we tremble through the metal detector – Go ahead! Go ahead! Go ahead! Go ahead! Go ahead! bouncing off polished stone named after dead presidents, shoes & wallets & black plastic tubs, histories scanned for threat down the conveyor belt, Vietnamese woman shakes so hard her legs won’t work, we go ahead with our bodies in thick accents and our Sunday best, us, waiting room numbers rehearsing our life, speaking in mother tongues, Brazilian girl asking for translator pulls on the hem of her flowered dress to hide a run in her stocking, Nigerian man twitching sideways glances, pen hovering a standardized form in search for a box to hold his crying eye color, black and bloodshot, we grip hands, tremble in limbo, our heads afraid to rise for each-other, renounce, abjure and re-pledge our allegiance as we bare our teeth for the camera. Yes, go ahead with your country inside my country, the luggage waiting to be claimed, passport-sized wallet photos, alien numbers and action notices pressed to the chest in unstamped love letters. Put my hand on your bible, is this how you want it? Call me your sweetheart, your good girl, your new side bitch and bend me over your knee
until I kiss the ground.
Andreea Ceplinschi is a Romanian-American writer, and a poetry reader for Passengers Journal, currently living in North Truro, Massachusetts. While her formal education resulted in BA degrees in Political Science, and Journalism and Mass Communication from the American University in Bulgaria, her love for the written word manifests itself as poetry, horror fiction, and creative non-fiction. Her work has been featured online in Passengers Journal, La Piccioletta Barca, Into the Void, Prometheus Dreaming, Cathexis Northwest Press, and in print in the 2019 Prometheus Unbound finalist issue.
