Brunswick
By Craig Kirchner
We left the trash sit too long, chicken paper,
they call it, the scraps and packaging
from what was a delicious Marsala,
made the kitchen unbearable.
The smell gags, the mind knows
immediately, the deterioration of flesh.
We know the smell, and the news.
Fox shows the police rounding up illegals
putting them on trains, sending them here
to be detained for deportation, to work until
they’re sent to their homes of origin,
depending on age, gender and ability to pay.
The Marxists and the underground
say there is an odor of corpses
buried in shallow, mass graves.
We notice the smell on the porch
when the evening breezes
come off the ocean and across the camp.
The commandant at Brunswick
acknowledges there are deaths.
You can’t put this many people together
and have no one die.
He attributes the stench to dead fish at the beach,
and having trouble with trash pick-up
We hope it goes away, and the bad press stops,
the economy here is booming,
the camp has provided good paying jobs,
and the camp personnel buy all the produce
we can grow. Everyone says the smell will go away
in time, probably about two weeks.
Craig Kirchner is retired and living in Jacksonville, because that’s where his granddaughters are. He loves the aesthetics of writing, has a book of poetry, Roomful of Navels and has been nominated three times for Pushcart. He was recently published in Chiron Review, Main Street Rag, The Wise Owl, Breathe, The Wilderness House and dozens of others. He houses 500 books in his office and about 400 poems on a laptop, these words help keep him straight.
Craig wrote this poem after Trump and his cronies mentioned camps, months ago. He and a friend were discussing that Texas had offered them a piece of land and that Brunswick, Ga, would be a likely place for such a thing. Craig wanted to convey the mentality it took for Nazis to look the other way in 1938 and what it would sound like now
Many articles about the ICE Detention Centers have been written. The following is an excerpt from an article on the PBS website.
ENA, La. (AP) — Amid rural Louisiana’s crawfish farms, towering pine trees and cafes serving po’boys, nearly 7,000 people are waiting at immigration detention centers to learn whether they will be expelled from the United States.
If President Donald Trump’s administration has its way, the capacity to hold tens of thousands more migrants will soon be added around the country as the U.S. seeks an explosive expansion of what is already the world’s largest immigration detention system.