Alien Haibun

by Leticia Priebe Rocha

After Ocean Vuong

Alien girl will

keep her mouth open wide and

swallow everything

The girl’s entire 8th grade class is highly encouraged to attend a 4-day trip to the nation’s capital. The girl still believes in the nation as she was taught, that she can someday be part of it, asks her mother and father to attend an information session. School administrators tell families, eager to raise good citizens, that for only $2500 their burgeoning almost-young-adults can immerse themselves in our glorious history and civic duty. The girl knows they are poor but does not want to get left behind. Her father says he will achar um jeito, figure out a way. 

The girl’s father wants to teach her the lesson that brought him to this country. That through hard work beyond your limits, you can earn the luxury of dreams, a life of opportunity for a dreamer daughter. He tells her that if she adopts an entrepreneurial spirit and sells baked goods to her classmates, he will work enough hours, and they will cover the trip to the nation’s capital. While taking her first batch of all-American chocolate chip cookies out of the oven, the girl burns where the oven mitt ends and forearm begins. He tells her to wear long sleeves in the sweltering heat of a country that asks too many questions. In a few months, she earns $300 from cookies. The girl learns the lesson that she must burn brightly for others to make her dreams enough.

The girl knows they are poor and illegal but does not want to get left behind. Upon learning of the trip, her mother and father warn her that domestic flight with an alien passport can lead to questions. The girl knows that questions can lead to deportation. Death to their world. Her mother arranges a meeting with the English teacher coordinating travel. They meet in the Starbucks across the street from the apartment where the girl, closer-to-but-not-quite a woman, will eventually spend years fighting the urge to jump from the 8th floor to her death. Not yet, no, the urge has not yet set in. For now, the girl is anxiously sitting in a Starbucks and watching from across the room as her mother reveals to her favorite teacher, the woman who gave her a love of language, their worst, their ugliest, the secret perpetually lodged in their throats. Illegals. They are illegals. The conversation lasts no more than 5 minutes and the two women come away smiling. In her teacher’s smile the girl feels, for the first time, if only for the breadth of a genuine flash of teeth, that safety exists outside of the secret. That she is not the worst, the ugliest, lodged in the throat of America. In her mother’s smile the girl feels the rumbling warmth of mountains shifting only possible through a mother’s love.

The girl turns 14 in the nation’s capital, the farthest from the home that is her family that she has ever been. She climbs down the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, buzzing with equal parts wonder at the grandeur of the nation and headiness of freshly found independence. Her mother calls to wish her a happy birthday. Sends her love. Marvels at how quickly she has grown up, how time slips right through her fingers. Tells the girl that she is getting back together with the man who has been beating her for months. The first time but not the last. Her mother eroding each time into a thinner and thinner husk of a mother. The girl has no way of knowing this now. The tendrils of this ugly truth encircle her still, color her gaze. The Reflecting Pool stretches out before her, infinite, but she cannot see her own reflection. The girl wants to be left behind, yearns to be pulled down into the depths of every ugly truth reflected in this place. The most American dream.

Published June 25th, 2023