The speaker
The speaker does not seem to be a single, discrete person describing her own experiences. Instead, she is an anonymous voice, addressing the experiences of many different migrants using the second person. In this way, the speaker addresses the many different migrants who are seeking refuge in today's contemporary landscape. She is attempting to speak to some of their pain and hardships, attempting to counteract the xenophobia that defines many people's attitudes towards migrants.
The boy you went to school with
The boy that, presumably, the speaker went to school with, and kissed once in an old tin factory, is an example of the changes and violence that have forced the speaker to leave home. The ordinary, human scene of the speaker and the boy kissing in a sweet display of young love is an example of how migrants did not come from a place that was always riven by violence. They did not just suddenly decide to leave. Instead, the speaker's home was once truly a home, once a place of safety where love was possible. They decided to leave when their home became uninhabitable.
Now, writes the speaker, the boy she once kissed innocently is carrying a gun bigger than his body. Many places that have experienced mass emigrations are places that have been suddenly overtaken by violence, and this violence often takes young boys victim, putting them on the front lines of insurgent revolutions or drug wars.
This boy is a reminder that life used to be ordinary for refugees, and none of them wanted to flee their homes. But their lives were irrevocably perverted by violence, with even innocent neighborhood kids becoming damaged, making it impossible for people to stay.
The prison guard
"one prison guard
in the night
is better than a truckload
of men who look like your father," writes Shire. The prison guard is a symbol of the men who, as supposed protectors, often perpetrate sexual violence on vulnerable women and children living in refugee camps. Left vulnerable, non-citizens without access to government protection, these women are unable to speak out against their assailants.
Many of these women and children fled their homes because in some war-torn countries, gang rapes are common. The horror of experiencing more rape and violence after fleeing rapes and violence is a reality that many refugees live with every day.
"You"
The "you" that the poem addresses refers to many different people over the course of the poem. Taken as a whole, the "you" of the poem seems to be an amalgamation of many different migrant narratives, adding up to a collective tale of the traumatic, chaotic experience of being forced to leave one's homeland for another place. It also sometimes refers to "you" as people who are not migrants, addressing people who judge or try to keep migrants out of their countries.
The poem follows this protagonist or combination of protagonists, seeming to tell a specific story, exploring intimate images from home and from the process of traveling to a new place of refuge. But this "you" seems to contain fragments of many other migrant stories, making her into a combination of many, many divergent tales of the agonies of migration—a nebulous character who becomes a stand-in for the migrant experience in general.
