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| The United Nations refugee convention of 1951 provides the basis for American asylum laws. Unlike the Trump plan, it does not prevent refugees from traveling through several countries before landing in the United States and seeking asylum. But it does ban signatories to the convention, like the United States, from deporting asylum seekers to countries where their safety is at risk, a process formally known as “refoulement.” —The New York Times, September 14, 2019. Photo: Members of a migrant caravan made up mostly of Hondurans and Cubans resting in the town plaza of Escuintla, Chiapas, Mexico, in April.Credit: Brett Gundlock for The New York Times. |
put the word out on the street we’re out of asylum finished weʻre not stocking asylum this season there’ll be no safe harbor here if you were looking for justice / equality / a listening hand / freedom from persecution we used to carry all those things but no more
asylum was way too popular! everybody wanted it! we couldn’t keep it on the shelves it got out of hand anyway we won’t be offering asylum under this current management
you ask—is there anywhere you can go to get some asylum these days? under the table? you’d pay above market price? you say you just want a whiff? well you might try our neighbor to the north—they may have a small amount of vintage asylum left i wouldn’t advise trying our southern neighbor they’re liable to tell you “si, como no asylum” then try and interest you in some AR-15s smuggled from here to there
Joanne Godley is a practicing physician and poet whose work has appeared in the anthology 50/50: Poems and Translations by Women over Fifty and the Kenyon Review blog. She lives in Maine.