Cries Across Borders

poems by

Mark Strohschein

49 pages, $13 (+ shipping)
ISBN: 978-1-964277-31-8

Projected Release Date: April 2025

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Mark Strohschein is a Washington state poet and educator who lives on Whidbey Island. Previously published poems have appeared in Flint Hills Review, Bryant Literary Review, Lips Poetry Magazine, The Milk House, The Big Windows Review, and Barren Magazine, among others. His work has also been anthologized. His chapbook-length work, Sanctuary of Voices, will appear as part of Ravenna Press’s Triple Series No. 30 in late 2025. His book of poems, We Share the Same Road & Other Poems, received honorable mention for the 2024 Sally Albiso Award, while an earlier version of Cries Across Borders was a semifinalist for Button Poetry’s 2023 chapbook contest. He also currently serves as a board member for the Skagit Valley Poetry Foundation.

In poems awash in sorrow, shame for his own inhospitable country, and love for his Brazilian-born beloved, Strohschein explores the many ways we creatures traverse this planet. Old boats, insects, exiles: the poet takes his own personal story and opens it up to myriads of daily journeys, from tiny to momentous, asking about belonging, and ultimately home. Strohschein’s  poetry finds its strength in tender observation and quiet certainty. ~Lorraine Healy, author of Mostly Luck and The Habit of Buenos Aires

“These poems, aptly titled, fully engage the pressures and indignities of the immigration process with a touching humanity. In poem after poem, Strohschein shows great invention in channeling with full force the anger, bewilderment, hope, sacrifice, and love he and his Brazilian wife experienced in their long journey of coming together. That journey springs to life in poems that merit reading and re-reading. This voice deserves to be heard. ~Sean McDowell, author of Learning to Jump and Metaphysical Shadows

Strohschein deftly evokes the anguish of migration, bureaucracy’s absurdities and the heart’s own unwieldy reconciliations. The opening poem (a stunning double acrostic) depicts the vexing borders between histories, desires, realities. Strohschein examines unsparingly the unsettling truths of his positions: American; stepfather; partner to one who’s lost, must remake, a self. At last, a marriage of realizations: everything we hoped couldn’t possibly be true even as the sky is sweet & blue / and promising. ~Sati Mookherjee, author of Eye and Ways of Being

Poem for the Exiles

I.

Either self-imposed or forced. Need to exhale
xeric air, alveoli-squeezed with deadly pox.
Insistent call to divorce your homeland. Or ennui
lifts you up, dares you to strike out & go AWOL.
Even family fades like footprints of dissolved love.

Exempt from nothing short of war or famine.
Xanadu or some shining promise. Fear of a hoax
imposing its will, shooting quills of a cacti,
licking blood from a chest of dreams. Unfurl
every flag of freedom you can find & thrive.

II.

Empathize with a Vietnamese boy: a strange
Xeroxed copy, he flew to the U.S. with six
itinerant relatives. Tasting food like foul fungi,
languishing in new cultural mores. A rice bowl
essentially filled with regrets. Far from home.

Each day he blossomed more lotus-like.
X-ray of his soul showed secrets of his sex:
intense desire for boys, no manly voice. No alibi
left for his racing heart, no cure for this conditional
elemental “affliction.” Mother still prays for his release.

III.

Eager for unification, cross-continental love.
Xmases pass. One, two. Distance is the unfair tax
immigrant couples pay, like alumni
locked in a School of Abeyance. Seal
envelops with patience. Wait. Hope.

Entering the U.S. willing to endure
xenophobia or working like an ox
in a rock-bottom job, you left your yogi /
lawyer self far behind in beautiful Brazil,
employed gainfully now. Redefining perseverance.

IV.

Exceptional country, why not embrace the exile?
X marks borders & barbed wire where only a fox
in its cunning can cross. We wander lost with Occuli
linked to our VR world where an immigration deal
exists only in the mind. Wait for the country to explode?

Unburdening

for Masume

An Iranian woman believes
she will be married off
to a Muslim man but it is
her sister chosen this time.

Fearing she will be next
she begs her father
to immigrate to the U.S. She
leaves to re-create her life.

Iranian relatives call & ask for money
in desperation. She gives &
gives until she cannot swallow
that burden any longer. It ends.

Her greatest secret: In 1990 she marries
a Lutheran man, a U.S. military veteran,
and in her heart it is right, but he is
not Muslim, defying parental orders.

This phone call reshapes the
course of her life. Her mother reacts
to this news: Well, Christ was a prophet,
one of the holy ones, so that is OK.

But it is her father’s wrath she
anticipates, expects the hammer
of his voice to fall upon her, the flood
of time & distance to drown her.

But he asks his beautiful immigrant
daughter very slowly in Farsi—
the years had only softened his heart:
Is he good to you?

The Bridge

In my dream, in our dream,
we crossed the bridge:
the bridge.

Not the bridge to America, the dream country
only for the privileged already there,
not for those outside looking in,
not for those who believe in the dream
until they arrive on its soil to deconstruct
the myth, to traverse assimilation’s cruel road
of no return.

Maybe that bridge was 35,000 miles long
from the Americas to Brazil,
it’s span too long to fathom.

In design it could have been any bridge:
the Mackinac, the Astoria-Megler, the Ambassador.

We traveled vehicle-less flying but seated, you & I,
wearing awe-smiles on our way to a country called
United Beyond Words.

Vehicle-less, too, so that we could feel free,
taste bitter red flecks of rusted iron that peeled
from those massive girders
holding that bridge together.

Vehicle-less so that air could drive through us,
so that no part of us could not be awakened,
as if we too could ride weightless
in a fantastic freedom bird, unhindered
by the things we carried.

In our dream, I don’t remember touching,
because maybe we believed that entering
that new country was an official act of passage,
that we had to behave one last time.

But we did sit so close together
with those awe-smiles,
those awe-smiles of love,
that no one border patrol agent
could ever understand by accessing
or reviewing our database profiles.

We passed through that border
not worrying about any document
that could deny us access
to each other—
no visa or passport
that could ever be taken away.

We, paperless,
stripped bare,
our voices reciting:

I pledge allegiance
to
our United Fates
in America.