Performed by Val Cole

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Get to know the poem:

1) What is the theme of your poem?

The theme is about ICE detentions specifically those that transpired in Minneapolis.

2) What motivated you to write this poem?

I was motivated to write this poem to shed light on the gross injustice done to immigrants in this country.

3) How long have you been writing poetry?

I am a South African-born poet living in New York City and I have been writing poetry for 16 years.

4) If you could have dinner with one person (dead or alive), who would that be?

I would like to have dinner with Nelson Mandela.

5) What influenced you to submit to have your poetry performed by a professional actor?

I am not a voice actor or even an actor for that matter, but I know how to write poetry. So having a professional voice actor read my work is priceless and truly accelerates the message in a powerful way.

6) Do you write other works? scripts? Short Stories? Etc..?

I have several poetry collections that include my experience as an immigrant in America. I write short stories also and have multiple competed novels.

7) What is your passion in life?

My passion in life is to use my words to communicate with the world in a way that moves people. Whether it be about immigration and social justice, or just a lovely little poem about my observations in life, poetry allows me to speak where my physical voice falls short.

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Neutralize

They arrive faceless,
as if shame were standard issue.

Vans idle.
A neighborhood becomes a diagram.

The public word is enforcement.
The private one is containment.

In the desert, tents flower—
soft-sided, seventy-two to a bloom.
Toilets flood rice with sewage.
Water tastes metallic, instructional.

A mother at an airport
learns the grammar of absence:
no food,
no water,
no sky.

Her daughter folds inward
like a closing book.

They call it civil.
They call it procedure.

History calls it rehearsal.

At Fort Bliss—
where the enemy once had a face—
a boy turns off a light
and wakes in an ambulance.
A body becomes leverage:
fingers tightening
where refusal lives.

Thirty-two dead in a year.
Four more before January settles.
One ruled homicide
in solitary confinement—
as if loneliness were not already lethal.

“Poisoning the blood,”
the phrase travels cleanly.
What do we do with poison?
We neutralize it.

Neutralize:
to render inert.
To make lifeless.
To subtract breath from belonging.

There are those who imagine
a gentle subtraction of millions.

But mass removal has a sound.

It is a child crying
into government bedding.
It is a fist correcting
a refusal to disappear.
It is a country rehearsing
how to forget its own reflection.

Inside the tents
people whisper their names
like contraband.

I am not poison.
I am not blood to be purified.
I am a body with a sky in it.

That is what will not neutralize.