Immigration Detention Centers
We are careful with names.
Names have consequences.
Names end careers.
We call them facilities.
We call them processing centers.
We call them temporary.
We call them necessary,
We call it the law
as if law were a force of nature
not our government
deciding who can live here.
The technical distinctions matter
to the people who make them.
The detained are not prisoners.
The facilities are not camps.
History waits until the people
who named things are dead
then goes back with a red pen
and calls it what it was.
Our Government will spend
the rest of our lives
insisting that wasn’t it.
Belinda Subraman, from El Paso Texas, began an online show in 2020, called GAS: Poetry, Art and Music which features interviews, readings, performances and art show in a video format as well as online journal and arts group by the same name. Books include Blue Rooms, Black Holes, White Lights, Left Hand Dharma and Full Moon Midnight. So far she has been translated into Chinese, Italian, Hungarian and Albanian. In 2021 she became a poet on the moon thanks to Samual Peralta and his Literary Archives on the Moon Project.
