Next Steps For Families [an erasure]

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I usually love the challenge of erasure poetry, that salacious gold-panning in a river of someone else’s words. I can usually distribute the weight of another person’s writing over my body without too much discomfort, confident that my eraser will find a new conversation within the text.

This poem, however, is not salacious, and it is not conversational. Using the one-page handout given to parents forcibly separated from their children as its foundation, this poem offers no hope of gold and makes no attempts at lyricism. Right now, thousands of mothers and fathers have no idea whether their sons and daughters are safe or not. Though I could never come close to experiencing these families’ anguish, I wrote this erasure with a goal of pulling the detached and cold voice of the American government into the forefront of readers’ minds and concerns.

I hope that, in some small way, this poem can keep the plight of separated families resounding in people’s ears.

The Asylum Seeker Advocacy Project (https://asylumadvocacy.org/) is a great way to get involved, even from afar.

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Jerrod Schwarz is the co-founder of Driftwood Press. His work has appeared in HOOT, The Fem, Entropy, Drunk Monkeys, and many others. He lives in Florida.