Money, Security, and Immigration Theme Analysis

To be from this barrio is to be made of this earth & clay:

dirt-packed, water-backed, third-world smacked:
they say, the soil beneath a country’s nail, they say.
I love my home. But it might be a sinkhole

trying to feast quicksand

mouth pried open; I hunger for stable ground,

somewhere else.

If you are not from an island,
you cannot understand
what it means to be of water:

to learn to curve around the bend,
to learn to rise with rain,
to learn to quench an outside thirst

while all the while
you grow shallow
until there is not one drop

left for you.

I know this is what Tía does not say.

Sand & soil & sinew & smiles:
all bartered. & who reaps? Who eats?

Not us. Not me.

Things you can buy
with half a million dollars:

a car that looks more
like a space creature than a car.

[…]

Five hundred flights
to the Dominican Republic.

A half million Dollar Store chess sets,
with their accompanying boxes.

A hundred thousand copies
of Shakespeare’s The Tempest.

Apparently a father.

I’m the child her father left her for in the summers.
While she is the child my father left me for my entire life.
I do not want to hate a girl with a glowing name.

But I cannot help the anger planted in my chest, fanning
its palm leaves wide & casting a shadow on all I’ve known.
I wonder what kind of girl learns she is almost a millionaire

& doesn’t at all wonder about the girl across the ocean
she will be denying food. Tuition. A dream.
Unless she doesn’t know about me.

It is strange to go from being an only child
to seeing someone wearing your own face.
Now there is this other person & supposedly she is my sister

where yesterday she was just a name
holding the future I thought I wanted;
now there is a girl of blood & flesh who is

second only to Tía as the closest thing I have to family.

I want to offer her platitudes & murmurs
that it will all be all right. But thing is,
this isn’t an uncommon story.

A lot of people don’t finish school
or follow their dreams. That fairy-tale plotline is for
telenovelas.

I don’t want to be brisk. It almost hurts me to look
into her wide, soft eyes & ask for so much.
But her softness has nothing to do with the desperation

I feel growing inside me. After Papi’s burial
I will have to leave this place. There is nothing
for me in this town where I see my exit doors growing smaller.

& there was a moment when the wheels first touched down
that my heart plummeted in my chest, but then we were slowing

& a smattering of passengers erupted into applause.
The old lady in the seat beside me said in Spanish,

“They don’t do that as much anymore. This must be a plane
of Dominicans returning home;

when you touch down on this soil, you must clap when you land.
Para dar gracias a dios. Regrezamos.” & I smiled back.

Zoila & I speak little on these trips,
but when I’m humming along to a song,
she turns up the radio.

& when her face was red from heat
in the clinic waiting room,
I used a magazine to fan it.

It is awkward, these familial ties & breaks we share.
But we are muddling through it.