By Scott Neuffer
FROM: Trampset

My wife tells me not to talk about it: her trauma. She survived the dirty wars in Peru. If you talk, you die, she tells me. People don’t talk about it. The dead are dead. The living go on. Sorry, it’s not my place, I say. But these ghosts. I can feel them.

Why are so many Latinx immigrants haunted this way, knowing nothing but extremities of life and death, torn between leftist dictatorships and right-wing death squads, the U.S. meddling and often supporting the worst elements? What of these wars that have scarred our southern neighbors? Is my exceptionalism so deep I fail to see how my paradigms don’t matter to people who come here, seeking what I have long taken for granted?

The trajectory of the immigrant life is a deep arc. Listen, I tell myself. Stop talking. Listen.

Ingrid M. Calderón-Collins is a refugee of the Salvadorian civil war. She reached out, told me she was raised Mormon before the war. I know the pain of the Mormon experience, have lived it. The guilt, the self-hatred. And I’m adjacent to an immigrant’s pain, the alienation, the silent resolve, always there. Tell me, Ingrid, do you want to speak? Is it safe to speak? The fascists speak all day long, filling the air with their hollow words, the vile edge of their hollow walls.

Your trauma is yours. What do you want to say about your life? Read Rest of Review Here