Coming through US Customs from Ecuador
the passport agent asks if I have anything to declare.

I know he doesn’t mean the duty free,
exotic perfume or rare cigars.
He isn’t referring to bitter cacao or
sun-sweetened coffee beans.

Granted, I’ve stashed a few seeds in my pocket.
Granadilla seeds, wrapped in foil-
that last snack I ate in the courtyard
with my grandparents in Guayaquil.
This isn’t his concern.

Coming through US Customs from Ecuador,
the passport agent asks if I have anything to declare.

I envision my grandparents sipping sangria
along El Malecon in the 1940’s,
dreaming of a fortune in rice, bananas, oil-
running those early tankers through
the Panama canal. It was a marvel then!
They were betting on a love that would outlast
malaria, revolutions, temptations, typhoons.

Coming through the Department of Homeland Security
from Ecuador, into Miami International Airport,
the passport agent asks if I have anything to declare.

I should declare the apologies. The explanations.
The what-if’s. The missing photographs.
The heartaches that have haunted
my grandparents, their parents, their children.

Coming through customs on to US soil,
I could declare that the actions and decisions
of one generation stretch exponentially
through families for decades to come.
Instead, I shrug, knowing seeds easily drift
from their roots in winds of change.

The passport agent asks my reason for travel.
I reply, “family.”
He nods, calls me an American and
stamps my passport.

Sara Shea

Sara Shea received her BA from Kenyon College, where she served as Student Associate Editor for The Kenyon Review, and studied with David Foster Wallace. While studying abroad at Exeter University in the UK in 2000, Shea won a “New Millennium Poetry Contest” sponsored by The Queen of England, British Parliament, and judged by UK Poet Laureate Andrew Motion. Shea pursued graduate classes through UNCA's Smokey Mountain Writers Program and Western Carolina University, where she studied under Ron Rash. In 2013, her short story "Shine" won the grand prize for creative non-fiction through Quarterly West, and Shea was awarded a fellowship to Writers@Work. Her stories and poems have appeared in The Connecticut River Review, Quarterly West, The Key West Love Poetry Anthology, Amsterdam Review, The Ledge, Wrath-Bearing Tree, and Petigru Review. Shea writes professionally, producing marketing materials for a fine arts gallery in Asheville, NC and crafting compelling SEO property descriptions for luxury homes worldwide.