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were there, because

      it’s a facility that only has capacity

      for a hundred and four.

      And we were told

      that they had recently

      expanded the facility,

      but they did not give

      us a tour of it,

      and we legally don’t have

      the right to tour the facility.

      We drove around afterward,

      and we discovered that there

      was a giant warehouse that

      they had put on the site.

      And it appears

      that that one warehouse

      has allegedly increased

      their capacity by an additional

      five hundred kids.

      When we talked

      to Border Patrol agents

      later that week,

      they confirmed

      that is the alleged expansion,

      and when we talked to children,

      one of the children described

      as many as three hundred

      children being in that room,

      in that warehouse,

      basically, at one point

      when he first arrived.

      There were no windows.

      And so

      what we did then

      was we looked at the ages

      of the children,

      and we were shocked

      by just how many

      young children there were.

      There were over a hundred

      young children when we first arrived.

      And there were child-mothers

      who were also there,

      and so

      we started to pull

      the child-mothers and their babies,

      we started to make sure

      their needs were being met.

      We started to pull

      the youngest children

      to see who was taking care of them.

      And then we started

      to pull the children who

      had been there the longest

      to find out just how long

      children are being kept there.

      Children described to us

      that they’ve been there

      for three weeks or longer.

      And so,

      immediately from that population

      that we were trying to triage,

      they were filthy dirty,

      there was mucus

      on their shirts,

      the shirts were dirty.

      We saw breast milk

      on the shirts.

      There was food on the shirts,

      and the pants as well.

      They told us

      that they were hungry.

      they told us

      that some of them

      had not showered

      or had not showered

      until the day or two days

      before we arrived.

      Many of them described

      that they only brushed

      their teeth once.

      Book: Passage

      You having the command of my Brigg Phillis your Orders

      are to Imbrace the first favourable opportunity of Wind &

      Weather to proceed to the Coast of Aff-ica—Touching first

      at Sinagall … Now in Regard to your purchasing Slaves,

      you’l Observe to get as few Girl Slaves as PoSsible &

      as many Prime Boys as you Can …

      — Letter from Timothy Fitch to Captain Peter Gwin, November 8, 1760

      Middle Passage:

      voyage through death

      to life upon these shores.

      — Robert Hayden, from “Middle Passage”

BLUES: ODYSSEUS

      How many sat underwater,

      entangled by myth’s past tense,

      before Neptune first raised his

      beard in the direction of Ethiopia,

      and after, Odysseus—

      always living—

      was saved by Homer’s tablet?

      Centuries after that story was written,

      in the land of Not Make Believe,

      a crew of slave-ship sailors

      threw one hundred and thirty-two

      Africans into the Atlantic Ocean.

      Heave-ho to souls.

      And people. And laws. And kin.

      But Odysseus lives. He always will,

      Our Great White Hope—

      before whiteness was invented—

      this hero who longs for the wood’s sway.

      Despite his tendency to chase tail—

      sirens and sundry other

      poppycock-drinking girls—

      I want to be happy that Homer imagined

      a sea housing pretty, forgiving Nymphs—

      while somewhere else, a wheel dances

      and someone else drowns.

      Sharks should pass Odysseus by,

      never imagining his taste.

      The gods shouldn’t pull at his fate—

      now angry, now benevolent.

      I try hard not to blame that man:

      We all deserve our Maker’s love.

POINT OF NO RETURN

       Somewhere on the Windward Coast, West Africa c. 1761

       [keep the men from muttering among themselves]

      parsing the air’s dying scent the water arms clutching

      at mirthful spirit back to this bereft lexicon

      dante’s castle on the rocky isle

      captured

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