Passages

By TEOW LIM GOH

Ten miles of concrete can bring you
to different places. Your feet carry you
across the ground, let you

into worlds unlike your own. You go places
you have never been. But what matters
is not where you have been

but what you see. What you choose
to see. Whether you let yourself
see the distance

between what is and what you want to be.

[Purchase Issue 15 here.]

Teow Lim Goh is the author of Islanders, a volume of poems on the history of Chinese exclusion at the Angel Island Immigration Station. Her work has been featured in Tin House, Catapult, PBS NewsHour, Colorado Public Radio, and The New Yorker. She lives in Denver.

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Passages

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The Ground That Walks

ALAA ALQAISI
We stepped out with our eyes uncovered. / Gaza kept looking through them— / green tanks asleep on roofs, a stubborn gull, / water heavy with scales at dawn. // Nothing in us chose the hinges to slacken. / The latch turned without our hands. / Papers practiced the border’s breath.