What do you mean,
your country?
I live here, it’s mine too…

then you explain how the borders of your country
are underground hip-hop and authors
I’ve never heard of.

Ridiculous, I say —
this country is Brit-fueled blues rock
layered in martial arts films —
and out at the border, they’re showing a spaghetti Western.

An eavesdropper says we’re both wrong

and this country smells
like a manger at its heart
with a general store owner
sweeping the borders daily
to keep them nice and clean.

Another says it’s a renovated storefront
full of screaming bands who have put meat
off their plates and out on the border
to rot where the sun can fall upon it.

Wrong, says a patient woman;
this is the country of betrayed pigments
and all its borders converge
on the Middle Passage.

A man who might be Indian, might be Latino,
maybe both, is raising his hand to speak
but he’s clearly from beyond another set of borders
so we don’t recognize him
although he protests that he’s been waiting and waving
for a very long time.

On the television there’s a woman who proclaims
that the border is right here, right outside
the studio, and her country is mint truffles
and Merlot, and sweet tunes from a Broadway stage.

A neighborhood warden says he never watches television
and that is perfection, since the borders keep spilling
through the screen.

And someone says: this is not my country
yet, I carry mine everywhere with me
and the borders are no more distant
than the edges of his pockets.

Your country, I hiss at them all,
is no country.  That echoes longer
than I would have thought it might;

how loud those words seem,
how much they stand out in the conversation,
as if they’ve never been uttered before
although it seems like it’s all anyone is saying.