Oh, I'm not done.
I think we're good on time.
Yeah, I timed this.
I'll allow you a minute to check in with yourselves
and how you're feeling.
Yeah.
We belong to each other, folks.
And when we experience that as a truth,
and we experience that as something that is fragile,
usually the sites of that fragility and its truthfulness
is around immigration policy.
This question around belonging and kinship and kithship.
When I came to this country, in 2001, September 2001,
which is a very awkward time to be a Brown person.
I'll just say I don't recommend it.
I could have chosen that better.
One of the first acts of collaboration
that my parents and I undertook, and my grandmother and I
undertook, was to fill out forms, immigration forms,
in our dining table in Glen Burnie, Maryland, which
is where I was going to school.
I was going to school in Baltimore.
And we would clear the table of all the dishes
and wipe away the rice and the water, water stains
and we would get out our paperwork,
and we would fill out the forms.
And I think that work of collaborating together
on the story of who we are, why we are here,
why we wish to stay here, has held us together
for all these years.
And I find it really important to return
to some of these documents and to tell
the story of these documents.
So I want to read from a segment called petitions,
in which you'll hear some of the language
from a form, an immigration form called the form I-130.
It is the petition for an alien relative.
So if ET is your relative, you can
petition for that little guy.
It is the petition that you use when your beloved is very far
away and you want to hold them.
So you get to beg someone you have never
seen to allow you the right to feel someone's skin again
before you die.
And this petition, the form I-130 petition
comes with a warning, which is the epigraph to this segment.
And the warning is actually-- it's a beseeching
appeal from the US government.
Please do not include graphic photos
of childbirth or intimate relations
as evidence for a relationship or a marriage.
Please.
I just love imagining that all of us immigrants
are just sending porn their way.
[LAUGHTER]
So there are several petitions and I will read them all.
First petition.
It is a Thursday and no one out on this long street
looks like your mother.
So you go home, wrap yourself in form I-130.
Knit a nest with a ballpoint pen,
limn your kin inside a placeholder
smooth your limbs into a square to beg
for a place for your first space.
Her.
Write her name into the petition in thin, improbable syllables.
No one calls her by this name in the elsewhere because they know
her fish market haggle purse tucked at the waist,
sari pleats pulsing like flushed gills.
No one except the men who will ask her.
Ma'am, can you name two national holidays?
And ma'am, who lived in America before the Europeans arrived?
So you plan it out.
Letter by letter in letters.
Your mouth cupped to her cataracts.
Ma, just listen and answer the men who
ask how she came to know you.
If she intends to remain here?
And, sir, for how long have you known that ma was a ball
made for two?
Brimming beyond any border, red as the arrival of her face
seven years later, a paper apparition
drawn closer and closer to you by a cue
unknotting at a frayed horizon in an airport.
When it is a Thursday, and suddenly she
walks through the passport photograph
you once stapled at the edge of a petition
to anchor her womb to your migrating heart.