Brandy Lien Worrall-Soriano

“49th Parallel, Partly Cloudy, 43 Degrees”

I never thought I’d see the day in real life

when my husband and I had to look up civil rights

advocates’ numbers and write them on our arms

with brand-new black Sharpies,

and we would have to create tags for our child in case she got lost,

even though the mere thought stops me from breathing,

then I remember I must breathe again.

Those are the kinds of things people do in dystopian novels,

not in real life,

going to join a woman’s march hopefully peacefully,

though how can we be really sure?

My daughter will remember the time we protested against the Bad Man,

and she knows his name, Trump,

and she says his name, Trump,

and she screams how he’s a bad man, thumbs down, Trump.

When I was her age, bad men and monsters were fake.

When we become adults, we realize, if we care enough to,

that bad men and monsters are real,

that God might not be real,

that God is probably fake.

Because why, why would a benevolent/non-violent God do all this?

So now we prepare for a drive that would normally be just another one

back to the country from which we all came and crossed,

we prepare with numbers, stats, identity cards,

to prove we are American, no matter what metric you use.

When we get to the border and the agent asks us if we are bringing weapons, we will tell them honestly, no.

But I am coming armed with this poem,

my freedom, and my right.