Disruptive
Poets
They tried to blame poetry.
We answered with more of it.
Against ICE
ICE is not abstract.
It is policy made violent.
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This page collects poems that confront, document, and resist the harm enacted by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement—detention, deportation, family separation, surveillance, and disappearance.
We center the voices of undocumented writers, immigrants, refugees, and mixed-status families. We also welcome accountable solidarity work that does not center the writer over the harm.
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This is not a debate space.
It is an archive of refusal, memory, and survival.
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Poetry has always recorded what the state tries to erase.
This page will exist as long as ICE does.
The Poems
after the kill
(on the execution of Alex Pretti)
By: Heather Emerson
​
do not
believe
tales from
predators
after a fatal
attack.
do not
believe
the blood
on the snow
was justifiably
spilled.
do not
believe
the hunters
who would
make you their
next prey.
do not
believe
the killing
will end
if silent
we remain.
His Hands: An Elegy for Alex Pretti
By: Laura Rutland
His hands were healing hands.
His hands checked vitals,
changed IV’s and dressings,
pushed crash carts.
His hands held the hands of dying vets.
His hands did ordinary things.
His hands loaded a backpack,
grasped the handlebars of a bike.
His hands petted his dog,
made music.
And yes, his hands touched a gun that morning,
placed it in a holster,
but his hands did not pull out the gun,
aim it,
fire it.
His hands held a phone,
lifted to protect his face,
tried to lift up someone else.
We need not make a plaster saint of him.
He was a man.
Perhaps he was irritating at times.
For sure he made mistakes.
But his hands tried to help,
and his hands are still
now.
So celebrate the hands
that hold the signs
that hold the phones
that hold the pen
that hold a hand in times of pain.
Celebrate the hands
that seek to heal.
And celebrate the voices
that sing as he did,
a boy in the choir.
Celebrate the voices that speak and say,
as he did near the end,
“Are you okay?”
Celebrate them all.
Still.
Now.
At the side door to Gino’s Pizzeria
By: Rochelle Jewel Shapiro
​
brown-skinned women hummed
as they rocked infants in carriages,
soothed toddlers who rested their heads
on their mothers’ thighs, and men leaned
against the brick front,
asleep standing up like horses.
Thirty years ago, it didn’t hit me
that they were all living in the small apartment
above Gino’s, taking turns
sleeping, showering, and using the toilet.
I didn’t know they had no documents,
that they had waded rivers or chanced
leaky boats or nearly smothered in vans
to cross the border.
It wasn’t yet spoken of, not in my town, maybe
in border towns, and not in headlines.
Slowly, faces became familiar.
The young man who stayed at the railroad
station to get out of the snow, out of the rain.
Mami, he called me, but hurried off
when I tried to talk to him. I thought
it was my spluttering Spanish.
I didn’t know he had to hide.
And the woman who mopped the coffee shop,
her little girl waiting at a back table. As soon as
my daughter outgrew her clothes, I brought
them to the mother.
Gino’s owner evicted them, converted the upstairs
apartments into a top-floor restaurant.
Where is the man who called me Mami?
Where is the woman who had worn my daughter’s clothes?
Ballistics
By: Jessica K. Hylton
​
They say ICE is just a word,
three letters you can hide
behind a badge, a policy,
a press release that never bleeds.
But I have watched bodies learn
what ice really is.
The way cold keeps
you still while it kills you.
They are murdering
us in the streets.
Even the straight
white men
with guns
are learning
that uniforms
do not love you back,
that the state
will eat anyone
once fear
becomes policy.
I come
from hollers
and back roads,
from porches
where politics lived
in the hands,
not the mouth.
A liberal hillbilly,
which means I learned
defiance
before I learned
its name.
My girlfriend flinched
when she found out
I owned guns.
I do not blame her.
History has taught
us what guns usually mean.
Mine came from fields
at dawn.
4-H ranges.
Dew on the grass.
Breath held steady
while boys laughed
until I outshot them.
Back then,
that was the only feminism
I had.
Beat them
at their own measure.
Take the prize money.
Use it to leave.
Resistance smelled
like gun smoke.
Not because I loved
violence, but because
it was the first place
authority had to notice me.
Later, the guns
became a contingency.
A story about exits.
Something I kept
for the days
my body felt hostile.
MS is not a metaphor.
It is learning how fast
safety can vanish.
One nerve misfires
and the ground
you trusted
is gone.
The map shrinks.
The margins close.
That is why this moment
is familiar.
The same logic,
just scaled up.
The state takes
kitchens, classrooms, churches
and calls them temporary
losses.
What was supposed
to be safe is reclassified
as expendable.
This is how power works.
It makes disappearance
feel administrative.
It asks exhaustion
to do the killing.
But survival
is not forged
in lead.
Guns were never
an answer.
They were a delay,
and even that came
at a cost.
What keeps us alive
is how we refuse
erasure.
How we make space again
with bodies, names, numbers,
and memory.
How we decide
that living
is not negotiable.
Safe spaces are not promises.
They are constructions.
They are reclaimed ground.
I live in a body
that keeps trying
to narrow my world.
I live in a country
doing the same thing.
And still we
advance.
Still we widen
the circle.
Still we take back
what they said
was gone.
They want us
frozen.
Reduced.
Silent.
We are not.
​
We are
taking
it all
back.