Nick Allison

after “The New Colossus” by Emma Lazarus

Not like the torch-lit welcome of storied fame,
With open arms set wide from land to land;
Here at our tower-lined, floodlit gates shall stand
A stone-faced sentinel with a torch, whose flame
Burns warning now for strangers, and her name
Mother of Removal. From her closed hand
No welcome glows; her iron eyes command
The razor-wired threshold fear and fortress frame.

“Keep your broken lands, your wretched!” cries she
With bare lips. “Show me your documents, your dread,
Your huddled masses cuffed without a hearing,
Your children handed to the state’s cold keeping,
Left to count the hours in numbered rooms.
Send these, I’ll send them back in chains,
I’ve dimmed the lamp, bolted shut the golden door.”

Nick Allison is a writer and editor based in Austin, Texas. His work has appeared in Slate, HuffPost, CounterPunch, The Fulcrum, The Shore, and elsewhere. He is the editor of The Chaos Section, an independent publication focused on politics, power, culture, and the human condition, and co-editor of The Chaos Section Poetry Project, which has published three poetry anthologies to date. He also secretly enjoys writing his own bio in the third person, probably because it makes him feel a little more important than he actually is.

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.