« Summer, 2016
By Then »

On reading “7-Year-Old Girl Starves in U.S. Border Patrol Custody”

By Rose Auslander
On reading “7-Year-Old Girl Starves in U.S. Border Patrol Custody”
Photograph by Stan Shebs (2005), cropped from original. CC BY-SA 3.0.

I heap my family’s plates as if

that would feed her. But who

can chew? Even two thousand

miles away, anyone can

smell the whitethorn acacia,

yellow sweetclover, desert

ghost flowers still blooming

in the dead of night. How

am I to keep scrubbing

plates soiled with hunger

as if they could be cleaned,

& those flowers—

must their faint scent fill me

with such appetite?  

Copyright © 2019 by Rose Auslander.

shortlink: dogb.us/border

          
Rose Auslander
Rose Auslander, whose last name means “foreigner,” is a Piltdown Review Featured Poet for May 2019. Her book Wild Water Child won the 2016 Bass River Press Poetry Contest. Her chapbooks include Folding Water, Hints, and The Dolphin in the Gowanus, and her poems have appeared in Tupelo Quarterly, Berkeley Poetry Review, Scoundrel Time, Love’s Executive Order, and A & U: America’s AIDS Magazine. Rose has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and has read her poems on NPR. She is Poetry Editor of Folded Word Press, and she earned her MFA in Poetry from Warren Wilson College.

               

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