My name is Rodrigo Tuma and one of the functions of poetry is to make you uncomfortable

is to face you with the truth and to face you with the truth put together in a form of

art that challenges you and certain poems make me realize that people who look like

me and sound like me have done terrible things in many places over many centuries.

Missed Nation by Natasha Trethway. In 1965 my parents broke two laws of Mississippi.

They went to Ohio to marry, returned to Mississippi. They crossed the river into Cincinnati,

a city whose name begins with a sound like sin, the sound of wrong, miss, in Mississippi.

A year later they moved to Canada, followed a route the same as slaves, the trains slicing

the white glaze of winter leaving Mississippi. Faulkner's Joe Christmas was born in winter

like Jesus, given his name for the day he was left at the orphanage, his race unknown

in Mississippi. My father was reading War and Peace when he gave me my name. I was born

near Easter, 1966 in Mississippi. When I turned 33 my father said, it's your Jesus year,

you're the same age he was when he died. It was spring, the hills green in Mississippi.

I know more than Joe Christmas did. Natasha is a Russian name, though I'm not. It means

Christmas child, even in Mississippi.

Natasha Trethway has spoken widely about coming from a mixed race family with a white father

and a black mother. She was with, she felt treated differently. She was with her father,

she might be perceived as passing for white, she might be treated better than her mother,

because she might have been perceived as less black than her mother. This poem is dense

with references and history. This poem makes reference to the fact that there was no miscegenation

in Mississippi. Also there was another law that you couldn't leave to go to a state where

there was such provision and then return that was also against the law. This poem refers to

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