from Architect 3

Architect 3 Poem Poetic Statement

published elsewhere as table {border-collapse: collapse;}

In May 2020, an internal ICE spreadsheet was made public, with the following repeated over and over, on every single entry: “Parole Denial Reason #1: Parent Does Not Wish to Separate.” The agency was investigated for the unlawful detention of children in its “family” detention centers, and for coercing parents to separate from their children through parole. Under the Flores Settlement Agreement, children cannot be detained for more than 20 days in facilities not licensed to hold children (which no ICE facility is) unless they pose a flight risk, so migrant parents were presented with an impossible choice: release your children on parole to foster care, or stay together in detention.

The spreadsheet I used as the container for “table {border-collapse: collapse;}” is a copy of ICE’s Excel document. There are a couple of things I was working with conceptually in this poem. The first is the violence of data—how it flattens and dehumanizes, reducing lives to values, numbers, rows, and cells. The table itself is carceral—words like “rows” and “cells” conjure the language of imprisonment, where complexity is sanitized, bodies are disappeared, and all sentences fit into a box. And this linguistic intersection—carceral language and data—was something I wanted to thrash wildly, illogically against its constraints, alternate between flashes of animal tenderness and corrupted data. I began thinking about how this could even be done in Excel or HTML, and one day in a text conversation, a friend brought up the CSS property, “border collapse,” which disappears borders around individual cells in an HTML table. And I loved that—finding the radical, human concept of no borders, no cells in the hyperlogical language of CSS code, how it can collapse borders and open cells.

In the U.S., the word “parole” is most commonly used to mean the conditional release from prison on the promise of good behavior. It is discretionary, granted to adults who have committed crimes. But parole cannot be denied to children, because it cannot apply to children. Children cannot be held, and so, therefore, cannot be paroled. If ICE’s spreadsheet is meant to deny bodies through abstraction in language, then this poem listens for the body denied, the voice refusing disconnection, abstraction, disappearance.

Parole requires, and is the body; langue is the symbol. “Parole denial reason”: the denial of the body, of childhood, of speech, of connection. If ICE’s spreadsheet is meant to deny bodies through abstraction in language, then this poem listens for the body denied, the voice refusing disconnection, abstraction, disappearance.

ALT TEXT:

Migration is an act inextricably bound to childhood
the wolf womb, the open portal, the time-wound,
the dark pines shining back eyes,
the shineback,
the crying woman
the slap from a man
the slap back
the hole in the wall
the fist in the girl
the half-moon split between nations
the obliterated nation
the chord in the bedroom
the milky flame
the leaf of cloth around the child
the found secret
the way down