‘My Parents Fold Like Luggage’
— Nix Thérèse
‘My Parents Fold Like Luggage’ makes the dehumanization of migrants wildly apparent, even from the title, as we follow the Tercel with a whole family of six squeezed into the trunk. The relative completeness of each line only makes the turns that much more heartbreaking: “What folds them into the trunk of the Tercel. / The belief that the folding will end. // It doesn’t.” How many times have I moved towards a new opportunity with the careless hope that it’d solve my problems only to be met with the same issues transfigured anew? And worse, when I was completely out of my element? These lines imply that journeying through this stretch won’t be the only time this family shrinks to fit, and being forced to play small becomes violence upon violence.
Linear time, space, and their concentrated effort to survive can be undone by a simple opening to the elements: “If the man in green opens the truck, the road folds back. // … why doesn’t he open the truck?” Subtly anti-pastoral in that being thrown to the expanse wouldn’t offer transformative healing until, at best, beyond the border, they desire to move through the air in anything but their own skin. This note also comes through in the mention of the “starless” trunk while the stars above “glitter / like broken glass.” The stars loom like so many twinkling, penetrating eyes, so it’s unsurprising that bypassing this natural beauty saves this family from being preemptively cut out. Even the manmade car is tied closer to the earth: “the Tercel is a small lady // bug traveling north.” It takes wing and flits through the landscape that they’ll never touch. As Oliverez constantly points out what blooms beyond this container, consider who gets the uninterrupted story. Who is free to explore the land without interception? And going deeper—if the sublime that marks the pastoral tradition is only readily available to those who are naturalized, is it worthy?