Culture

"I feared the door. Someone coming to take my parents away."

Poetry in We Contain Landscapes spotlights a child of formerly undocumented Polish immigrants.

Patrycja Humienik April 10, 2025

People hold signs as hundreds of high school students participate in a protest for "A Day Without Immigrants" through downtown Los Angeles on Feb. 4, 2025, against increased federal enforcement against illegal immigration. (Photo by Frederic J. BROWN / AFP via Getty Images)

I wrote these poems as the queer daughter of formerly undocumented Polish immigrants, from a country whose borders have been drawn and redrawn over centuries. Having birthright citizenship saved me from the ever-present reality my parents faced. Though whiteness helped my parents pass as documented, the precarity of being found out was a big fear of mine as a child.

One of the central questions in my new book, We Contain Landscapes, is: To whom do we belong, and at what cost? How do we move beyond dominant paradigms — of ownership, of borders, of shame? I dream for these poems to face the aches of this world head-on, to help get us somewhere more loving, more free.

Salt of the Earth

In a blurry photo from my first trip to Poland at 19, me and my godmother, one of my mother’s ten siblings, are laughing together, a thousand feet into the earth, in a 13^th century chapel made entirely of salt. Sculptures carved of rock salt, rock salt chandeliers, a rock salt Last Supper.

       
                                                                         In childhood, she was one of many names.
                                                                          A voice on the phone. A formal exchange.

Table salt was made there from the upwelling brine. Upwelling the closest thing resembling a wall in water.    

                                                                    •
﻿
                                                                         I feared the door. Someone coming to take
                                                                                                                               my parents away.

                                                                                                                                   Illegals—Taking
                                                                                                                                      American jobs—

                                                                             In classroom debates about immigration,
                                                                                                                                            I kept quiet.﻿

                                                                    •
﻿
Watching my godmother watch her grandchildren running the edges of the creek I wanted to call a river. Slicing bugs from mushrooms picked before dawn. Dropping the slivers quick into buckets. Asking when will I have children, and haven't I had enough school already, and how is it that we have so much debt in America?﻿

                                                                    •
﻿
                                                                                                                   Shielded by whiteness,
                                                                                                          assumed to be documented.

                                                      Threaten the economy—One out of every 12 newborns—

                                                                    •
﻿
﻿In another aunt’s kitchen, over rosehip tea, she said I wasn’t as spoiled as they’d expected, for an amerykanka. I was proud, and devastated to be called American. ﻿

                                                                    •
﻿
                           Providing an advantage to family members seeing secure citizenship—

                                                                                         Silence both protected and betrayed.﻿ ﻿

                                                                    •
﻿
At 22, running up a blur of pines, beyond my uncle’s turkeys and geese, to where my mama grew up picking blueberries, I planted a little tree. Where I’m invited to return.﻿ ﻿

                                                                    •
﻿
The difference between a river and a creek is that
from a creek, no new branches are formed.

                                                                                                          Anchor baby, n. Offensive 
    

Borderwound

Great Polish poets were born in cities that no longer belong to Poland.
Now Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine. My people claim the imagined place.
Guarded by the Gates of Dawn, the Cross of Saint Euphrosyne, the
golden lion with its coat of arms, the crowned eagle. The idea of nation
is a record full of_________. Anzaldúa wrote, the U.S.-Mexican border es
una herida abierta. Scrawled in black marker on a wall in Bulgaria,
EVERY BORDER IS A WOUND. On how many walls, in how many
languages is it written? Wounds unlatch on every continent. A map
only approximates. Each time Poland was erased, the Wisła river
remained. Can a river unwound? There’s a Polish saying that quiet
waters tear the banks. Cicha woda coming for my outlines. On a strip of
polluted beach beneath the Poniatowski Bridge, faces warmed by the
golden hour, a painter tells me, breathless, that Warszawa was
magnificent before the war. The past disrupts the current. It happens
all the time. We climb to see the river at dusk, a different scale, tilting:
past-future, future-past.

Archival

      I descend the gallery stairs
            to the history of women
where my legs are cut off at the knee.

Carved with the knife of ecstasy.
            I lie down halved
next to the instrument of my thinking.

Not the bodiless head
            but feet, their subduction,
in bronze, polymer, gypsum.

Migration is the story of longing
            is the story. To risk
rupture for rapture.

Footprints on the ceiling,
            a ladder I tug down
            from its primeval coil.

Steel, fiberglass, and copper,
            where finish splits from color,
longing is ribless as a scorpion.

Do not fix me to the vanishing
            point. I cannot afford to lose
what I cannot possess.
    

These poems are excerpted from We Contain Landscapes, out now. “Salt of the Earth” first appeared in the anthology Here to Stay: Poetry and Prose from the Undocumented Diaspora.

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Patrycja Humienik, daughter of Polish immigrants, is a writer, editor and performance artist. She has developed writing and movement workshops for the Henry Art Gallery, Arts+Literature Laboratory, Northwest Film Forum, in prisons and elsewhere. An MFA candidate at UW-Madison, she serves as events director for The Seventh Wave, where she is also an editor for the Community Anthologies project. Patrycja grew up in Evanston, Illinois, and lives in Madison, Wisconsin.