Naomi Helena Quiñonez




The New Warsaw Ghetto

The new Warsaw ghetto
on the Texas Mexico
border down the street
on the California border
the Arizona border

Publicly financed
corporately owned
government operated
enclaves of despair

The new Warsaw ghetto
metastasizes
in the not so good ole USA
in detention camps
in cages in isolated
windowless prisons
driven like spikes
into the southern border

In the new Warsaw ghetto
children are torn from 
their families 
and warehoused
like animals
shivering under
aluminum covers
or left to sleep on 
unforgiving streets

In the new Warsaw ghetto
tear gas smothers
and the feds de-mother,
thousands of refugee children

They are red meat
for the haters
for men of means
and for mean men
who follow the fascist 
rules of ethnic cleansing

The refugees are brown
and must be kept out
must be kept down
		
“The country is full” he says
as if it’s a hotel 
“No room for you”
even though this is 
their land too
their America

They have journeyed
3000 miles
to escape their failed states
a legacy of US interventions 
banana republics
dirty wars, exported torture
exploitation and control
		
They have entered
into a mouth of hatred
a tight sphincter
of hostility

In the new Warsaw ghetto
families disintegrate
disappear
disaparacidos

To the haters I say	
Careful…. lest you
become a refugee

of a fire
a flood
a mudslide
a drought
a tsunami
an earthquake
a tornado
a hurricane
a market crash
a massacre
a mortgage
a sinkhole
an eviction
a tyrant
a war

Careful…. lest you
become a refugee
forced to escape 
collapsing
port of entries
from which there
is no return

Careful…. lest you
become a refugee
desperate and stuck
on an invented line
stranded
on a slim island of terror
denied
denounced
dehumanized

Careful 
we are all 
straddling thin
fraying edges
the uncertainty
of madmen
of natural disasters
eminent domains
and rash developments
of Warsaw ghettos

Soon we may all 
be on the the move
in search of a refuge
from disintegrating societies
natural catastrophes
and from the paralyzing 
devastation
of human love