My father once brought me to the sugar fields
Where the border between Haiti and our country

Was not clearly marked. He handed me a machete
And told me chop, and chop again, the tall stalks.

I was careful at first, measuring each sweeping gesture
By how far away my father stood and how much air

My lungs permitted me to take in and let out.
It didn’t take long for the machete to grow light in my hands.

I pulled it back and struck down a cane with two swift chops
Again, and again, just as he said I should do.

It was there, before even my grandmother was alive,
That Trujillo, El General, said he would remedy

The Haitian problem. Soldiers soon followed
Wielding machetes and carrying parsley

In their pockets. Perejil is Spanish parsley,
And slurring the r meant you were Haitian,

Which meant they would kill you. Plataneros, cattle herders,
Even catadors grabbed machetes. The sugar

On the blades mixed with the blood of the Haitians,
And a sweet blood flowed into El Rìo Dajabòn.

I don’t know how long the water flowed red,
How it must have tasted, salty or sweet.

And here, decades later, in New York
My grandmother still talks about the Haitian problem,

And the suited men on the television
Announce once more their solution to the Haitian Problem:

Dominican children of Haitian immigrants
Cannot stay. The blood that flows through them

Is the blood that flowed through the Dajabòn.
Every morning, I listen to my grandmother’s stories

As I pour her coffee, drop in one, then two cubes of sugar.