HORIZONS

I always wanted to leave the States of shining steel,

Where everything hums in the key of money, 

Where even the air feels itemized, priced, billed.

I thought distance would quiet it —

That an ocean could muffle the sound of a country counting its capital in dollars.

I thought departure meant relief.

But what happens after you leave?

A President still signs his name to war

Without waiting for permission. 

Sets my Iranian friend’s home aflame.

Impressed with the fallen ash upon their ruins.

Communities still fracture under ICE.

The blind are still being left alone in the freezing cold to die,

Unseen,

Unheld.

The winds in Kansas still carry

Sharp words across a flat land —

Trans kids still brace themselves

Against both the weather and the neighbor.

The machinery does not stall

Just because I step away from it.

History does not pause

To mark my exit.

I know I am not a lever

That tips the balance of a nation.

Still, these wounds pulse in me

As if my passport were stitched

From the same cloth.

I can trade suburbs

For stone villages beneath the Pyrenees.

I can watch fog roll over ancient peaks

Instead of highways.

But America follows —

Not in skyline, but in heartbeat.

Its daily tremors

Shake me wherever I stand.

We cannot outrun the arguments of our time.

We cannot expatriate ourselves from conscience.

We can fight, or we can flee.

And the good thing is —

I am only gathering breath.

I will come back.

I have always preferred the fight.