"Home"

Your eyes are brown and your passport used to be green, now blue, and you have just removed your belongings your baby from seat 26J and 26K and have walked off the plane and into the customs line. You have left the Land of the Pure and are now in the Land of the Free and the passport officer talks over your head to the other officers about where they will go for lunch. She barely looks at you before tossing your passports one two three in a see through folder and a puffy man comes up to you your husband your baby says Follow me and you ask Why? And your husband says Let me do the talking and you retort Why does this always happen? And the passport officer looks at you shrugs Sounds like you've done this before and in the Extra Screening room they ask your husband question question question but don't they see this is your business trip, not his? Don't they see that everyone in this room is colored? That almost all the women are hijabed? And when the puffy man says Young man, No phones allowed to the Black man, does he realize that the man isn't really young, instead he's old? And your heart was thumpthumpthumping to be home, but now it's going pitter and patter and what kind of country, what kind of continent is this, that almost every time you return “home,” you are pulled to the side while your lonely red bags call out to you on the conveyor belt circle circle circling?

And if your grandmother was here she would look around the room full of people like her and me, us, then at the officers in the Extra Screening room and shake her head say Not Nice. Not nice at all.