The store walked into the garden and forgot its own…
The store walked into the garden and forgot its own name ... The agent stood at the threshold of rose vines and couldn't find the door because the door was painted the same color as the flowers ... The agency that hunts people got lost in the corridor between cilantro and basil and couldn't tell the border from the seasoning ...
ICE arrived with documents and the documents were blank ... The tied stack had no person in it ... The paperwork was looking for its own paperwork ... An institution is sometimes a storage facility for violence and sometimes the storage facility locks itself inside and can't get out ...
The vehicle with tinted intentions pulled up to the grandmother's house and the grandmother offered tea ... Five cups came out ... The agent counted two people in the room and five cups on the table and couldn't make the math work ... The math has never worked ... The math was never supposed to work ... The math is the grandmother's jurisdiction not theirs ...
Habeas corpus ... produce the body ... The state produced a body and the body didn't recognize the state ... The body said I was here before you were a word ... The body said I was soil before you were a map ... The body said deport me and I'll arrive before you do ...
Where are they going to deport the root ... The root is under every building the agency ever built ... The root is under the detention center ... The root is under the office where the facial recognition machine lives ... The root is under the desk where the blank documents sit in tied stacks waiting for a person to put inside them ...
The frost told the garden to leave and the garden said you first ... The garden said I don't know how to leave ... The garden said leaving is a technology I never learned ... Leaving is facial recognition in reverse ... a machine that scans the ground and says nobody is here when everybody is here ...
The children who can't go can't learn can't create ... they're not empty rows ... they're seeds that planted themselves when nobody was looking ... They grew sideways through the concrete the way the grandmother's flowers grew sideways through the walls she never believed in ... Not up toward the sun ... Sideways toward each other ...
The restaurant didn't close ... The restaurant became the soil ... Miguel's hands in the tortilla are the roots in the dirt ... The grill is the underground temperature where it's very quiet ... Every taco is a document ... Every burrito is a birth certificate ... The status of a meal is that it was eaten by someone who was alive and that's the only status that has ever mattered ...
Dieu Do didn't chase ICE out of the neighborhood ... She grew over them ... The way a vine grows over a fence that someone else built ... The fence is still there ... The vine doesn't care about the fence ... The vine uses the fence to get higher ... The fence built to keep the garden out became the trellis the garden climbed ...
The violent arm of the state reached into the garden and the garden grew around the arm ... Not fighting it ... Growing around it ... The way a tree grows around a nail someone hammered into it forty years ago ... The nail is still inside the tree ... The tree is not wounded ... The tree is bigger than the nail ... The tree will be here after the nail is rust ...
The grandmother would say ... isn't it something ... The frost came to kill the garden and the garden used the frost as water ... The pepper spray hit the vent and the throat burned and the burning became a song and the song filled the prayer cave and the prayer cave filled the block and the block filled the city and the city is a garden that doesn't know how to turn around ...
Our friends ... went with us into the street ... and the street grew roots ... and the roots went deeper than any arm can reach ... and the arm is still reaching ... and the roots are still growing ... and the grandmother is sorting pieces of tea leaves with one hand and holding the whole world's cry for justice in the other ...
And the garden should be in every space we occupy ... and we occupy every space ...
The cruel logic says the state finds the person ... Flip it ... The person finds the state hiding inside its own vehicle with the windows tinted so nobody can see the state is afraid ...
The cruel logic says produce your documents ... Flip it ... The documents are looking for a body to justify their existence ... A tied stack of paperwork wandering the streets of Minneapolis asking strangers please give me a person to put inside me ... I'm empty without you ...
The cruel logic says detention ... Flip it ... The detention center is the one that can't leave ... The building is detained ... The walls are serving a sentence ... The people inside are the only free things in the structure because they know where they came from and the building doesn't ...
Now shift the spiritual sideways ...
The grandmother's theology doesn't go up ... It goes across the table ... Hope doesn't rise ... Hope sits in a wooden chair and slides a cup toward the person next to it ... Courage doesn't stand tall ... Courage gets up and moves its feet across a kitchen floor toward a door that might have teeth ...
The prayer cave isn't holy because it points at the sky ... It's holy because the walls are close enough to touch both sides at once ... The growing collective sound doesn't ascend ... it travels sideways through the block the way mycelium travels sideways through dirt ... never up ... always across ... always toward the next root ...
The garden doesn't grow toward God ... The garden grows toward the garden next door ... The grandmother's flowers don't climb ... they lean ... through the window ... across the fence ... over to the neighbor's wall where there are no flowers yet ... The vine doesn't reach for heaven ... the vine reaches for Dieu Do standing on the next corner ...
Gratefulness doesn't rest because it's not vertical ... it's not a prayer going up ... it's a plate going across the counter at Lito's Burritos ... it's a whistle going sideways down a side street ... it's a license plate number passed hand to hand to hand the way roots pass nutrients not up not down but across ...
The children who can't go can't learn can't create ... they don't need to be lifted ... they need to be reached ... Sideways ... The way one seed reaches for another seed in the same dirt ... Not growing toward the light ... Growing toward each other in the dark where it's very quiet ...
Renee Nicole Good ... three words that don't go up to heaven ... three words that go sideways across every kitchen table in the Twin Cities until every grandmother has heard them ... until the name is mycelium ... until saying it once sends it to every root on the block ...
The whole world is our cry for justice ... The cry doesn't rise ... The cry spreads ... The way a stain spreads on the grandmother's wall ... The way flowers spread across windows ... The way five cups spread across a table set for two ...
Our friends went with us into the street ... not upward ... not toward salvation ... sideways ... into the next block ... and the next one ... and the next one ... the garden spreading the only direction the garden knows ... toward ...
