Merril D. Smith

You think it will never touch you,
they’ll never come, not for you,

but the hate of others—
brown-skinned, trans, non-English speakers—
(maybe you)

has bloomed like toxic mold,
black spots darken everything.

Just business, they say,
private prisons and concentration camps,

money to be made on incarcerated bodies
warehoused without medical care, beaten,
raped—

children

grasped by careless hands
(I don’t care, do you?)

Just doing our job,
the masked men say,

using as bait
a boy in a blue bunny hat,

little Liam should have been safe
at home, playing—

just following orders, the masked men
say again,

hoping their regime stays in power.

Merril D. Smith is a Pushcart and Best of the Net nominated poet. Her second collection, Held Inside the Folds of Time (Jane’s Studio Press), was published in 2025. Her first full-length collection, River Ghosts (Nightingale & Sparrow Press), was Black Bough Poetry’s December 2022 Book of the Month. She writes from southern New Jersey. Find her at Bluesky: @merrildsmith.bsky.social; Instagram: mdsmithnj; Blog: merrildsmith.org.

This poem appears in Uprooted: Poems of Resistance, Witness, and Survival (The Chaos Section Poetry Project, Fall 2026). We’re sharing each poem from the collection individually over the coming weeks. You can read the full book or download the free PDF here.