Joely Williams

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They Are Building an Office for Disappearing People

They are building an office
for disappearing people
on a stretch of road
where the buses come late
and the sidewalks buckle
under the weight of bodies
with nowhere to land.

Concrete trucks arrive at dawn,
white paint rising like a clean lie,
windows tinted to hide
the rooms where names become numbers,
where accents become suspicion,
where brown paperwork becomes
a reason to vanish.

Across the street,
men sleep in the park,
their breath stitched into the damp grass.
Women fold their lives into library bathrooms,
washing survival in sinks meant for hands,
not whole histories.

They build this office
within eyesight of hunger.
They raise these walls
beside tents and cardboard beds,
as if poverty itself were not already detention.

On Saturdays,
we gather with cardboard signs,
marker ink bleeding through
the rain.
No cages in our city.
No human is illegal.
Our voices echo off the unfinished walls
like unanswered prayers.

Police stand between us
and the doors,
hands resting casually
on their weapons,
as if hope were the real threat.

Cars honk in solidarity.
Some slow.
Some spit curses.
Some pretend not to see.

A man named José tells me
he hasn’t slept indoors
since his wife was deported.
He keeps her phone number
written on the inside of his shoe.
Another woman clutches
a folder of papers like a life raft.
Every page says she belongs.
None of them are believed.

Behind us,
the city keeps moving.
Lunch breaks.
Coffee runs.
Afternoon meetings.

The cranes swing overhead,
building the architecture
of fear while children walk past
on their way home from school,
learning early which bodies the world
is prepared to erase.

---

Learning the Shape of Grief

At some point,
you realize
this country is not broken-
it is functioning
exactly as designed.

That the cruelty is not a glitch,
but a feature.
That the suffering is not accidental.
That the distance between promise
and practice is the true border.

You learn this slowly,
like a second language.
Through headlines.
Through sirens.
Through the tightness
in your chest every time a video autoplays.

You learn it in classrooms where history is softened,
in hospitals where care is rationed,
in grocery aisles where hunger wears
a thousand disguises.

You learn it when justice becomes paperwork,
when mercy becomes policy,
when survival becomes a personal failure
instead of a systemic crime.

At first,
you rage.
Then you mourn.
Then you grow quiet in the way oceans do-
carrying entire storms without surface collapse.

And somewhere between despair and resolve,
you begin to accept the grief as permanent,
like gravity, like weather, like inheritance.

But acceptance
does not mean surrender.
It means learning
how to live with open eyes.
How to love without illusion.
How to build inside the ruins.

It means choosing
Tenderness in a world trained for cruelty.
Choosing community over empire.
Choosing witness over comfort.
It means standing in the middle of the wreckage
and saying:

We are still here.
We are still breathing.
We are still building something they cannot burn.

---

The Tongue of the Parish

I carry the Bronx
in the back of my throat,
a jagged, rapid-fire rhythm
that trips over the slow,
syrupy vowels of the South.

Here, the air is a binary
I cannot break.
They look at my skin
and see a white enough shade
until I speak,
until the rhythm of the train
hits the quiet air
of the grocery store.

I watch the white faces stiffen,
a visible flinch
at the yo and the deadass
and the fire.
The segregation here
is a polite, cold wall.
I am a ghost
in their machine.

The Black folks watch me
(justifiably)
with a narrow eye,
holding their breath
until I make a joke,
until the lingo lands
and the walls come down-
until they see the Boricua
in the bridge.

I have learned to say
Yes, ma’am
like camouflage,
tucking my edges
into the soft pleats
of Southern manners.

But my skin is a record
of a different border.
I am not from their heritage.
I am not from their tradition.

I am a map
they haven’t learned
how to read yet.

---

Domestic Altar

The South has no smell
that I recognize.
The pines are silent,
the humidity a blank slate.
So I build the Bronx
inside these four walls.

I play the music loud-
the salsa and the freestyle
vibrating the floorboards
until the house remembers
where I came from
even if the neighbors don’t.

I fry the plantains
until the kitchen is thick
with the scent of home,
a heavy, golden shield
against the pine-scent outside.
I sauté the sofrito sautéed until memories of my Titi’s meals,
drunken Fridays, and songs of heartbreak come to mind.

I keep the lingo sharp,
a blade I hone every time I talk to my mother on the phone.
I am an island in this parish, cultivating a garden of back then and remember.

I cook,
I listen,
I show up,
but I am always the one who brought my own light
to a place that only knows how to stare.

---

Concrete Bloom

Mami’s hands smelled of Fabuloso and iron-
a sharp, floral chemical that tried to scrub the city
out of our skin,
the soot out of the narrow hall.
We lived in the almost,
almost enough for rent,
almost enough for a miracle.

The playground was a cage of chain-link
and sun-warmed asphalt,
but we grew anyway,
stubborn as weeds cracking the sidewalk,
insisting that even a shadow
is a form of light.

But the system was a mouth
that wanted me elsewhere.
The first day of school was a funeral.
I wept until my navy blue dress
was pleated with salt,
dark blue rivers running down my chest
because the door closed
between her and me.

They handed me to a babysitter-
a surrogate ghost.
I hated her for not being the original.
I threw her child-sized furniture
against the walls,
my mouth a small volcano
of cabrona and puta,
Spanish venom meant to poison
the space she occupied.

Then came the commute-
the long, cold training.
Learning the maps, the buses,
the iron veins of the city
that pumped me miles away from her.
At sixteen, I stood in the fumes of the new
At the Old Navy,
Yonkers Mall a glass box
of folding and refolding.

The managers were wolves in polo shirts;
the strange men lingered by the denim,
calling us fresh meat
while we clocked in and out.
I learned yet again
Between the stock rooms and floors
how the world looks at girls
who are barely women-
as a harvest,
a thing to be used.

She stepped out of that mall
into a marriage,
into a house of children,
a map without a legend.
With no father to show her
what a husband could be,
She looked for the shape of a man
in the dark.

And all the while,
the pull stayed-
that cord stretching back
to the Bronx,
longing for the smell of Fabuloso,
wondering why the world
builds so many roads
to keep a daughter
away from her mother.

---

Residue

There is a stain on the kitchen counter
that won’t come out.
Not juice,
not tea,
but the blue light of the screen
dripping into the cereal bowls,
staining the milk.

How do I tell my children
that the world is a beautiful place
when I just watched a man lose his breath
on the same glass
they use to play their games?

I wipe the counter anyway,
a ritual of denial.
I bake their treats-
flour dust in the air like a shroud.
I look at the weather,
I look at the news,
finding a hundred small excuses
to keep them inside,
to keep the door locked
against the reality of the street.

When we finally go out,
I zip their jackets
like armor.
I tug the hoods low,
checking the seams,
praying the fabric is thick enough
to keep the ghost of the news
from touching
their shoulders.

---

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Banner Art:
Hoot Falls, Collage, Joely Williams