Aileen Bassis

Wants and Needs

in response to our government that said migrant children don’t require basic sanitation

soap
pillow
dry underwear
a band-aid for your knee
a sweet to quiet your cough at night
food that tastes like home
to hear a voice you know
to have words to tell your story
and someone to listen and a hand
to wake you gently in the morning
and to have quiet all around you and a door
that you can open and a door that you can
close and to stroke your mother’s hair
and smell your father’s skin and never see
another fence

Reading a Plantation-Owner’s Diary

Lye soap and sun can’t
wash away one November morning
when a small brown boy,
a house slave wet the bed
and was beaten.

He wet the bed again in December.

How old was he?
Five or six?
His name was Eugene.
Master made Eugene drink
a pint of urine. Was it Master’s
piss?

And did Eugene ever have another name?
Did his mother roll
vowels from West Africa,
call him her Amani
or blur and shape
the name Ndifi as her yellow-
white milk crusted in the corner
of his mouth?
Or was he taken away
so young that she never
called him anything
at all and the memory
of his warm weight
sat inside her and maybe
she thought of him
on cloudy days before the rain
when her knees and hips throbbed,

or maybe his only name was Eugene.
House slave,
brown boy-child in Master’s house.