INTOLERANCE DEGREE ZERO: A LETTER FROM HOMELAND SECURITY, THE US ATTORNEY GENERAL, AND THE POTUS

by Roxanne Lynn Doty

As the White House faces court orders to reunite families separated at the border, immigrant children as young as three years old are being ordered into court for their own deportation proceedings, according to attorneys in Texas, California and Washington, D.C. —The Texas Tribune, June 27, 2018

Dear Migrants and Asylum Seekers,

     We are implementing policies to keep our homeland
safe from your scattered bones and disobedient
dreams that traverse la linea between our air and yours.
We have executive orders, vacant Walmarts
and Bible verses on our side.  In the name of sovereignty,
we will send vultures to swoop heavy over the hearts
of your children, seal loopholes in arid scratches of earth
with blood from blisters on your feet. We will erase
your name and bury your destiny in an open grave
on the migrant trail as we watch the sky rain dust
from skeletons of all the crossers we have funneled
into the killing fields of the Sonoran, Mohave
and Chihuahuan Deserts. And if you emerge
from these wastelands, we will warehouse your sons
and daughters behind the stripes of our flag,
as sludge spills from the sewers of our mouths.
God bless America, we are not a sanctuary,
we do not do body counts, and we do not keep track
of where we send your babies.

Roxanne Lynn Doty lives in Tempe, Arizona. Her short stories and poems have appeared in Forge, I70 Review, Soundings Review, Four Chambers Literary Magazine, Lascaux Review, Lunaris Review, Journal of Microliterature, TheNewVerse.News, Ocotillo Review, and are forthcoming in Saranac Review, Gateway Review, and Reunion—The Dallas Review. Two of her short stories were finalists in the 2012 and 2014 New Letters Alexander Patterson Cappon Prize for Fiction, and the editor of Lascaux Review nominated one of her stories for the 2015 Million Writers Award.

FRIDAY NIGHT ON EAST VAN BUREN

by Roxanne Lynn Doty

"Weeping Woman" by Pablo Picasso

It was the end of the line on Van Buren, a Friday night in April, a section of this gritty street where it leaves the city behind, disappears into east valley sprawl, and forgets the history that rumbles beneath its concrete and asphalt, the ghosts of old Phoenix that breathe the night air. The woman stood under the 202 overpass, moving from fence post to fence post, lightly touching each as if in a child’s game or dance, her long hair flying in wind that rushed through the valley that night, blew dead palm fronds across the 4 lanes, debris into the air to flutter gracefully in the haze of dull streetlights and she walked into the oncoming traffic, stood with arms spread—a welcome or a plea or an effort simply to breathe and the cars stopped and watched and some blew their horns and waited as she got onto her knees and folded her hands in prayer in the glare of terrified headlights. And I wanted to say, leave her alone, give her space, don’t call anyone, she has probably been fucked over time and again and beauty has a strangeness and sadness a glow and I looked around for red lights, for an official vehicle that might have been summoned.  But the night remained still and free from authority and we waited and the woman finally rose, and walked to the other side of the street and climbed the incline toward the highway and the traffic began to move again.

Roxanne Lynn Doty lives in Phoenix, Arizona. She has poetry in I70 Review and short stories in Four Chambers, Forge, Soundings Review, Lunaris Review, Journal of Microliterature and Lascaux Review. Two of her  stories were nominated for the New Letters Alexander Patterson Capon Prize for Fiction.