They've made a home in the borders

My poem "Colonial" has been accepted by Mithila Review. There's a strange chime of timing: I wrote it last spring during the protests when the federal government had just designated anti-fascism a form of terrorism, as opposed to the patriotism of attempted coups. The longer fuse was the information about my ancestry which had come to light the previous fall, namely that all my life I had been used to thinking of myself as descended from immigrants on the margins and suddenly there was a recognizable name on the rolls of the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1636. It does not change my responsibilities to this country's present and future, but it is the reality of the past. I am very pleased that the poem will have this home, especially now.