Kerfe Roig

Who, then, can we become? Our identities have been erased. We have been sorted into anonymous composites of bodies and minds—cut, rearranged, superimposed and pasted onto a predetermined transcript, that allows for no individuality, no escape from their prison boxes of perjury. Our faces have been frozen into synthetic amalgamations of alien avatars.

Where have you hidden our laughter, our spirits, our tears?

Who knows us? Who sees us as real? Who will call us by our true names?

cold as ICE
these masks without human faces
hiding behind guns

A resident of New York City, Kerfe Roig enjoys transforming words and images into something new. Her poetry and art have been featured online by Silver Birch Press, Feral, Pure Haiku, Zen Space, Visual Verse, Collaborature, and The Ekphrastic Review, and published in Ella@100, Incandescent Mind, The Raw Art Review, The Anthropocene Hymnal, The Polaris Trilogy, and What We Hold On To: Poems of Coping, Connection, and Carrying On. Follow her explorations on her blog at kblog.blog

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.