The Border

With words carved by Yee of Taishan, a Chinese migrant, on the barracks walls at the Angel Island Detention Center

In the quiet of                          San Francisco, shifting
and settling down like
night, I heard, faintly,             dark water scraping
the rocks back home,
the whistling of wind.             Reading Yee’s poem, I searched for signs
to make my hands go quiet.
The forms and shadows       were almost enough to do it,
but the light in this room
saddened me; upon seeing    my mother in my dreams,
folding in half
the landscape,                         hammering down her love
like railroad tracks,
I composed a poem.                500 miles away at the southern border,
a 17 year-old boy watches
The floating                             lightbulbs in the ceiling.
Low mountains,
clouds, the fog, darken            each poem he thinks up, though
he makes nothing as flat as
the sky. The moon                    a mouth facing Mexico.
The detention center wall
shines faintly as the                 women nearby hum. In the night
he thinks he hears
insects chirp. Grief                  smooths the day’s edges
but says nothing new. Sleep
and bitterness entwined           almost feel like refuge,
so he tells himself they
are heaven sent. The sad         light steps into one corner
of the room, where a
person sits alone, leaning       against the chain link fence. As if
by a brother who now appears only
by a window,                            in visions, stomach of the coast,
the silent land.

Esther Sun is a Chinese-American writer from the Silicon Valley in Northern California. A two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, she received a Gold Medal Portfolio Award in the 2021 Scholastic Art and Writing Awards and has published poems in Cosmonauts Avenue, Pacifica Literary Review, Up the Staircase Quarterly, and elsewhere. She attends Columbia University.