A poem reflecting on face masks and cultural fault lines.
By Tasha Jun
For you
it is
prohibitive
a muzzle
to mock
doesn’t work
it’s un-American
Your name-calling
forces me
to remind myself
that I am
also
an American
I hear you
say it’s about rights
and freedom.
Refusal
is your strength
For me
it’s a gift
my 엄마 sent
packed with love.
It works
like it’s worked
for generations
of people
like me
You call
people like me
weak and wimpy
foreign and filthy
unintelligent sheeple
yet still sneaky enough
to steal
jobs and rights
from people
like you.
Others
have said
the same things
about people
like me:
On railroads
being built
for America
at crowded lynchings
on San Francisco streets
in internment camps
at our own restaurants
while we fed you
the food
of our homes
and heritage,
on parking lots
while being beaten
to death
with a baseball bat,
while pumping gas
in Indiana,
as we fill
our shopping carts
at a Sam’s Club
in Texas,
and taking
the garbage out
of our own front doors
in Brooklyn.
We walk
this narrow line
of humanity
breathing
the same air,
you and me.
What if
the line is really
a widening crack
in the earth
beneath
our collective feet?
When we
all
fall
in
will we see
that in
the end
we were all
created different
for the same home
made to long
for the same covering
of shalom?
Photo by Portuguese Gravity on Unsplash
Tasha Jun is a biracial Korean American melancholy daydreamer, wife to Matt, and mama to three little warriors. She’s lived and stood in places where cultures collide for as long as she can remember, and most days you’ll find her homesick and thinking about identity, belonging, and lost things becoming found. She’s been writing about those things ever since she received her first journal in the third grade.