Synkroniciti is pleased to welcome poet John Milkereit from Houston, Texas, with “Newspaper Photograph of Border Agents Discussing the Separation of a Family.” John addresses the humanitarian disaster occurring at the US/Mexico border. “A little girl with a hazy purple dress/ clings to a leg, hiding her face.// This is not about a lost doll,/ or walking in circles to win a cake,/ or flying a kite over June’s roses.” What does it say about The United States of America, and about each of us living here, that this girl is alone and frightened in a place she came for help? John’s poem staggers about the page, irregularly indented, as shocked as we are, or should be, at the incongruity here–a vulnerable little girl, uniformed officers with guns on their hips. John’s clear-sighted, conversational poem is accompanied by Kitty Sherwin’s Why?, a sculpture which describes the same scene, or one very like it. How did this become normal? John and Kitty do not look away from the harm our society is doing to immigrant children and their families and they challenge us not only to look, but to find a way of helping.
Read “Newspaper Photograph of Border Agents Discussing the Separation of a Family” in Synkroniciti’s “Vulnerable” issue, available here: https://synkroniciti.com/the-magazine/purchase-individual-issues/.
John Milkereit lives in Houston, Texas working as a mechanical engineer. Four years ago, he was outraged after reading a newspaper article which inspired this poem. He has completed an M.F.A. in Creative Writing at the Rainier Writing Workshop. His work has appeared in various literary journals such as The Comstock Review, Panoply, and The Ekphrastic Review. In December, Kelsay Books published his fourth collection of poems entitled Lost Sonnets for My Unvaccinated Lover.