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to.
    9. At Pandem did not go what few places people were allowed to go. Here, roes can want.
    11. Have more comforts in the home that could not have at home.
    17. Yes, more places to go, parks & playgrounds for children.
    19. No comment.
    Question: Are you advising friends that it is better if they move to Panpax?
    Answers:
    1. Yes. People don’t really believe the things we write, I didn’t believe myself until I got here.
    2. No. I am not going to encourage them to come, for they might not make it.
    6. Yes. I have two sisters. I am trying to get them to come here. They can’t understand why I stay, but they’ll see if they come.
    7. People don’t realize how some parts were awful where we came from; folks here ain’t afraid to breathe.
    8. Want friend & husband to come; also family who want to see how she looks before they break. Youngest son begs mother never to think of going back.
    Only a few migrants were found who came free. Few expressed a desire to return.
    The responses utilized in the previous poem are taken from the 1922 report The Negro in Chicago . The document is a thorough sociological study conducted by the Chicago Commission on Race Relations to understand the causes & effects of the devastating Chicago race riots of 1919, one of many inflection points of violence during what was dubbed “Red Summer.” Chicago’s conflict left twenty-three African Americans & fifteen white people dead, over five hundred injured & at least a thousand homeless. As a part of their post-study, the Chicago Commission interviewed African Americans who’d left the Jim Crow South for Chicago. The previous poem, from “SURVEY” on, repurposes the report’s text. It uses fragments of these migrants’ answers, excerpting & erasing parts to create a newfound poem. From the report, the terms North or Chicago were replaced with Panpax. Back home or the South were switched for the word Pandem. Roes was put in place of Negroes . The interviewee numbers are in accord with the number given to that answer in the original document. Certain questions have also been partly preserved (for example, “Do you feel greater freedom & independence in Chicago? In what ways?” became “Do you feel greater freedom & independence now in Panpax? In what ways?”).
    Panpax is a meshing of pan , a prefix from Greek meaning all , & pax , the Latin word for peace .
    This poem & its pain are both imagined & as real as we are. That is to say, through some fictions we find fact; in some fantasies wediscover ourselves & then some.  Even without living it, a memory can live on in us. The past is never gone, just not yet found.
    Grief, like glass, can be both a mirror & a window, enabling us to look both in & out, then & now & how. In other words, we become a window pain. Only somewhere in loss do we find the grace to gaze up & out of ourselves.

_ _ _ _ _ [GATED]
    Ha, we’re so pained,
    We probably thought
    That poem was about us
    & not another. Now we see
    It was for both—for all of us
    Who have been othered.
    Where we are is no less
    Than where we’ve come from.
    To be haunted is to be hunted
    By a history that is still hurting,
    Needing healing as much as we do.
    & just like that, through poetry,
    We have recalled what was not ours,
    Made the past the same as our pang.
    This may be the only way we learn.
----
    * * *
    We’ve spent generations quarantined,
    Exiled from the places of each other,
    Life locked out from us.
    Call us
    Colum-abused,
    Columbusted,
    Colonized,
    Categorized,
    Cleansed,
    Controlled,
    Killed,
    Conquered,
    Captured to the coast,
    Crowded,
    Contained,
    Concentrated,
    Conditioned,
    Camped.
    Never forget that to be alone
    Has always been a price for some
    & a privilege for others.
    We have yielded
    Centuries of sidewalk,
    Trained in this tradition
    Before we even lived it—
    What it is to bow our heads
    & make room for someone else’s pride.
    That ceding of the walkway
    Was the concession of the world
    To another’s