I never found the memes about the GOP funny.
But they became unbearable when my aunt called me crying,
Her English breaking in the receiver as she told me
that a white boy clawed at my 12-year- old cousin Safiyy’s face on the bus ride home from school,
And called him a terrorist until he screamed bloody murder at the bus driver to intervene,
By then, this boy had woke the sleeping blood out of the surface of Safiyy’s skin the way the
Republican party woke the sleeping white supremacy we thought this country had long killed.
The hate is still alive and breathing.

I thought the worst things Safiyy would get picked on for in school were the same things I did:

1. Being bad at gym class basketball;
2. Smelling like the food we made at home; and
3. Kicking ass at math.

But things are worse than ever.
Until now, my family has never tried to rationalize why we live in America.
Across the Atlantic, there are craters where the burning flesh of Pakistani families
confetti down from U.S. drone strikes and we are complicit in this country:

where we don't quite belong.
where we are told constantly that we should go back to Pakistan but the
violence of America is just as much of a threat there.
where it is almost routine that a twelve-year-old brown boy stares in horror
as he sees his own blood, glowing and sticky under the fingernails of the
bully on the back of the bus.
where the laughter never stops when a person of color does not speak the right
dialect of white.

After this poem, someone will play devil's advocate and tell me

That this was an isolated incident,
That this bully is the exception not the rule,
That things are not this bad everywhere:

Like I don't know America is the biggest manufacturer of fear.
Like I don't know our media works around the clock to indoctrinate unparalleled allegiance.
Like I don't know this country suffers from the same type of violent nationalism we try to topple overseas.

We are the citizens of nothing but a diaspora of violence:
If we let the blood vessels on Safiyy's face break open like borders,
If we let his skin scratch so deeply that his blood can't be carried to the tissues and organs that need them,
If we let them rip his face like bombs breaking open the heart of lands until
Their bodies, histories, and the cultures are no more.

Whether clawing at the borders of our homelands abroad or at our faces,
American white supremacy remains the biggest threat to safety in our lifetime.

Safiyy,

As your mom cries into the phone, her voice and hope for you are as broken as the blood
vessels in your skin. Your dark skin and the red stains on the brown leather seat of the bus,
of who the child who hurt you will grow up to become and if it is too late to stop him.