Welcome to “Poetry at The Arts Fuse.” A new poem every Thursday

The Buford

What should I say? The nausea of motion sickness

washes over me. A metaphor to conceive the world

today is not better than attempts to describe it.

Description does not explain. Situations are framed

  by description

that helps clarify understanding. When falling short

of explanations, metaphor amplifies conceptions.

A man was grabbed in New York City, not for the empathy

he felt for people being murdered in war but the impact

made in broadcasting that empathy. Protests demanding

his release bespoke broad support, if not for his cause

then for the more principled cause of not getting arrested

   for feeling empathy with murdered people.

Mahmoud Khalil’s arrest was a trial balloon (metaphor).

If the state can deport students without trouble

then the stage is set (metaphor) for more deportations

of people with unpopular views, even Americans

which is what the state told the court that it desires.

The president taunted the senate minority leader

for opposing him, calling him a Palestinian,

believing he can take citizenship

and ethnicity equally by kingly decree.

What can be said? The president wants people to believe

that all immigrants are criminals but no one coming

to the United States has more felonies than the president.

A century ago, 249 prisoners

boarded The Buford for deportation.

Guarded by Marines, and a ship’s crew armed with pistols

tho no uprising of prisoners occurred. Anyone

under armed guard is a prisoner like Mahmoud Khalil,

anyone held in LaSalle Detention Center, a prison

owned by a for-profit corporation, whose stock soared

(metaphor) after the presidential election

lobbied for by the now-Attorney General. For-profit

prisons got the green light by the state on day one.

The Buford is a stand-in for deportations of people

the government doesn’t like. A new Buford flew

from Texas despite the orders of a federal judge

who ordered its takeoff stopped, its flight turned around

but the administration defied the judge and mocked him.

Is there a metaphor for due process or is due process

a judicial act and metaphor for flagrant abuses

of the authoritarian actions widely advertised

at the ballot box? The prisoners aboard The Buford

numbered more than the prisoners landed in El Salvador

to work as slave labor by agreement

between the State Department and El Salvador’s presidente

a financial windfall (metaphor) for El Salvador

and a crushing situation for anyone caught

in the race-based dragnet of ICE.

The metaphors pile up, understanding is grim.

The hill the administration chooses to die on,

the legal case on which it plants its flag,

the dishonorable badge it wears with pride,

is the illegal exile of Kilmar Abrego Garcia

victim of abduction, injustice, and cruel jokes.

The administration is a toxic cloud but

never pretends to be on higher ground.

Plucked off a street in Somerville, Mass.

by secret police who faces were masked.

(If faces are covered, police work is secret.)

Car windows smashed, a family in New Bedford.

A woman and daughter thrown to the ground

in Worcester, upset neighbors threatened

with arrest. Two men in Newton beaten

  resisting the secret police.

The secret police grab nannies from sidewalks,

grab men by the throat at Home Depot.

They handcuff people going to the dentist,

and on their way to church, rough them up

  in front of their children.

(The shattering glass of everyday life, lives smashed.)

They barge into restaurants, throw kitchen workers

into vans, lurk outside courtrooms and

  naturalization offices

to arrest law-abiding immigrants, snatch them

  from their families.

How understand metaphors of cruelty and violence

done to others? How know the terror imposed on others

when their own words are locked under armed guard

  or flown out of country in secret?

Does the country feel sick, no, it’s always like this

with constant waves of various social ailments

always coming and going. Bufords fly at all times,

demanding high quotas from the secret police

to make the administration look tough

as it torments the country’s newest and

most vulnerable people, and instills

the nausea of helpless empathy

in anyone else sickened by this dark path.

Daniel Bouchard is the author of Spider Drop (Subpress). He lives in Massachusetts, and works outside of a classroom.

Note: Hey poets! We seek submissions of excellent poetry from across the length and breadth of contemporary poetics. See submission guidelines here. The arbiter of the feature is the magazine’s poetry editor, John Mulrooney.

— Arts Fuse editor Bill Marx