What Covers Us

A poem reflecting on face masks and cultural fault lines.

By Tasha Jun

For you
it is
prohibitive
a muzzle
to mock
doesn’t work
it’s un-American

Your name-calling
forces me
to remind myself 
that I am
also
an American

I hear you
say it’s about rights
and freedom.
Refusal
is your strength

For me
it’s a gift
my 엄마 sent
packed with love.
It works
like it’s worked
for generations
of people
like me

You call
people like me
weak and wimpy
foreign and filthy
unintelligent sheeple
yet still sneaky enough 
to steal 
jobs and rights 
from people 
like you.

Others 
have said
the same things
about people 
like me:

On railroads 
being built 
for America
at crowded lynchings 
on San Francisco streets
in internment camps
at our own restaurants 
while we fed you 
the food 
of our homes 
and heritage,
on parking lots 
while being beaten 
to death 
with a baseball bat,
while pumping gas 
in Indiana,
as we fill 
our shopping carts 
at a Sam’s Club 
in Texas,
and taking 
the garbage out
of our own front doors  
in Brooklyn.

We walk 
this narrow line 
of humanity
breathing
the same air,
you and me.

What if
the line is really
a widening crack
in the earth
beneath
our collective feet?

When we
all
fall
in
will we see
that in 
the end
we were all 
created different 
for the same home
made to long 
for the same covering
of shalom?

Photo by Portuguese Gravity on Unsplash

---

Tasha Jun is a biracial Korean American melancholy daydreamer, wife to Matt, and mama to three little warriors. She’s lived and stood in places where cultures collide for as long as she can remember, and most days you’ll find her homesick and thinking about identity, belonging, and lost things becoming found. She’s been writing about those things ever since she received her first journal in the third grade.