On Return

For Migrant Workers

Poem by Poulami Chatterjee

To return is to be redacted.

To return is to be denied land and history.

Nations produce the past, capital sponsors the nations,

headlines echo exclusion, endings are scripted

for the dispossessed.

For where do we return?

To uncanny borders, lands sliced apart,

laws like scalpels, surveilled into silence?

Or to bright screens peddling promises,

with painted lips and false embraces murmuring:

"look here, follow me, buy it, be me."

Or perhaps to slave bonds in foreign warehouses,

labor sensationalized, then erased.

We cough blood, numb our brains

for the profits of the state that built the fences.

Pixel by pixel

we are blamed, beaten, belched.

Pixel by pixel

we are regulated, profiled, relocated

for crimes we did not commit.

There is no space for us.

If we belong nowhere,

live nowhere, die nowhere,

then we become aliens in blackouts,

strangers to our work,

breathing carcasses, with glitching memories,

bartered, blurred, and displaced.

And for us, who walk unnamed,

home begins when we dismantle the fences.