If They Should Come for Us

In “If They Should Come for Us,” Fatimah Asghar uses travel imagery like maps and other images that link with place, location, and navigation as a motif throughout the poem. The speaker finds her people “on the street” (Line 2), and takes us to “the airport” (Line 13), a location of some global contention after the so-called Muslim ban on travel to the United States in January 2017. The reader meets “the muslim man who abandons / his car at the traffic light” (Lines 15-16), and “the lone khala at the park” (Line 20). The reader learns that the speaker’s “compass / is brown & gold & blood” (Lines 23-24); their “compass” (Line 25) is also “a muslim teenager” (Line 25) on “the subway platform” (Line 27). In the latter third of the poem the reader travels from “sand” (Line 34) and “ocean” (Line 35), through floral-infused air and back to “the street” (Line 39), now a dangerous place, shard-strewn and dark. In the end, the speaker looks to their own sky to “follow” (Line 45) the “map” (Line 44) drawn by their people.