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Queries - Virtual Worship for White Friends Confronting Racism
Resources for newcomers:
What happens in Quaker worship?
White Friends Confronting Racism Worship Guide
What are queries?
3/27 & 28/2025
ICE Agents Storm My Porch
By
Maria Melendez Kelson
The Indiscriminate Citizenry of Earth
are out to arrest my sense of being a misfit.
“Open up!” they bellow,
hands quiet before my door
that’s only wind and juniper needles, anyway.
You can’t do it, I squeak from inside.
You can’t make me feel at home here
in this time of siege for me and mine,
mi raza
.
Legalized suspicion of my legitimacy
is now a permanent resident in my gut.
“Fruit of the prickly pear!” they swear,
striding up to my table
to juice me a glass of pink nectar.
They’ve brought welcome baskets
stuffed with proof I’m earthling.
From under a gingham cover,
I tug a dark feather
iridescing green — cohering
to
“magpie”
thought,
to memory’s chatter,
to mind. Mine.
And here they have my mind translated
into a slate-surfaced pond, which
vibrates in the shape
of a cottonwood’s autumn molt,
which trees me to dirt, which soils me
heat & freeze —
But you’ll always be
one definitive document short! I complain.
Doubts can forever outstrip
your geo-logic.
For which they produce
a lock of my natal dust,
bronzed
to the fluttering fiber
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3/27 & 28/2025
ICE Agents Storm My Porch