- I'm Jessica Femiani.

I'm gonna read to you my poem, "Standing at the Cutting Edge of "the Fascist Takeover of America".

One.

As we walk past the house with the four foot silver Buddha seated in the wooden beams of a tree house shrouded and lilac branches bursting, my friend Maria tells me, "You can't do this kind of thing in Russia."

Her eyes glance at the "Not My President" bumper sticker slapped on the back of an old tank of a Buick.

Maria talks about the things I had heard, that people disappear when they say things, like her mother's brother, Uncle Boris.

Then the neighbor downstairs, they took him in the middle of the night just like that.

We are in it now.

No longer on the cusp: Kilmar Ábrego García, Mahmoud Khahil.

God bless, Zohran Mamdani.

These days.

I ask myself, "Should I make a quick getaway the way Gerhard Richter drove "himself out of East Berlin never to see "most of his family again?"

I can see why Maria's thoughts didn't make sense to me then.

I guess I never thought I'd have a reason to worry like that.

The same way it never clicked when a blonde-haired, blue-eyed little girl named Christina made her way out of the woods and into my childhood backyard, just like a fairytale, that it was anything but.

My mother tells me Christina's parents had been refugees in Rome having escaped the Russian pogroms of the 1980s.

I don't know if it were the "Nightly News With Dan Rather", or if as a child, I could conjure fear out of anything.

But after Christina moved in, I began having nightmares of being caught in the woods by Russian soldiers.

Every night they hid in the woods, driving the butts of their rifles into the center of my chest, pinning me to the ground.

Two.

The experiment of America is now Cowboy Town.

Masked thuggery, haranguing immigrants, citizens.

Shattering windows, windshields, throwing mothers to the ground, abducting elementary-aged school children, makes me think this dystopian nation is the fallout of the flagrant willed blinding of men and women living in a country of stunted vision?

Or is it the gluttonous desire driving our own consumption that wills us to push the truths of hard history aside?

Leaving us to mark history with half-priced mattresses.

Not because Bob Barker would say, "The price is right."

But because it is the dream that has gone awry.

It is the dream that gets you, gets you to believe if you move your children to the suburbs, they will be safe.

Gets you to believe your children will be happy to have all that you did not.

The morning Silverio Villegas Gonzales drops one son at nursery school, it is likely in this small Chicago suburb, Silvio was worrying his fate as undocumented.

Outside the traffic light, ICE gunned him down.

The records, the bodycams shows no threat.

His two orphaned sons, now somewhere in foster care in Idaho, five states west of Illinois.

No experience necessary, Kristi and Markwayne want more bodies on the ground, to wreak more havoc on Black & Brown hearts.

Because they say, they say, "Those people, "they cross borders, they break the law, "they're lazy, they steal."

Americans are challenged by the ease of their circumstance, they can't comprehend the backbreaking work they refuse, left for the undocumented.

To pick corn, tear husks, stock wooden crates, staplegun shut, stack high, how can you?

The undocumented slaughter cows, the pigs, the chickens, sometimes losing fingers, hands, whole limbs to bring Americans all your beloved barbecued burgers, how can you?

The undocumented haul endless crates of apples, oranges, ruby-red grapefruits.

Undocumented hands submerged in streaming baths of ice-cold, for twelve to fourteen, whittling carrots into bite-sized babies.

How can you tell your three-year-old, "Daddy, is at work, attacking the illegal people."

How can you?

All the oligarchs, the bounty hunters, the pimps.

How can you?

("The Star Spangled Banner" by Smith and Key)