You wanted to know
about the difference between the two countries. In mine,
they would write our names
on t-shirt tags, on sneaker tongues, or along the thumb
of a baseball glove:
they knew what we lost.
Elsewhere, a mother
has, in a globally circulated photograph,
inked her daughter’s name,
birthday, and family phone numbers on her daughter’s
back. The Instagram
post shows the daughter
shirtless and diapered.
The handwriting, clumsy with rewritten letters, crawls
slantwise up and down
her skin. Already social media has called it
a fraud, a staged shot.
Wisely, the talk shows
blurred certain digits
so strangers wouldn’t crank call her cousins; honestly,
the thought had occurred
to us, but we resisted. Why do we keep feeling
that this is a test,
that we’re failing it?
Gas is expensive
now. We skip some of the relevant war articles,
we’ve got the famous
slap, the comedian’s love life, the crypto surges.
And we’re thinking back
to Big League Chew days:
on school assignments,
we preferred to work in pencil, and when we printed
our names in neat block
letters at the heads of papers, we loved the small blue
line dividing us
from what we would do,
from all the mistakes
we were sure to make, yes, we felt gratitude for that
territorial
line between the country of promise and the country
of ruination,
and even later
we still caught lucky
breaks: I spent my sophomore year in Brazil with a host
family, I went
to school, but because I couldn’t speak much Portuguese,
no one expected
excellence from me,
all I had to do
was document the fact I’d been there, sat through classes.
Finals were easy—
I didn’t need answers. I just had to sign my blank
tests. I had to own
what I hadn’t done.