Summary

“Orange Alert” relays the experience of moving through airport security theater as a brown-skinned American in a post-9/11 world. The poem takes the heightened security atmosphere in airports and the name of the “orange alert,” to imagine a scenario where the security apparatus is looking for orange fruit. In this imagined reality, people’s navels are a concern because of the existence of navel oranges, and people from states that produce oranges are disproportionately targeted. In the final lines, the speaker hears that the alert level has been raised from orange to red, and the poem closes on a quip about comparing apples and oranges.

In “The Elephants,” the speaker’s brother still hears the tanks he heard when he was in the armed forces, and the speaker compares the tanks to elephants. The speaker’s brother says she will never understand war unless...