Growing up you see freedom as
a flock of birds, taking flight together
from telephone wires, black shapes against the dawn sky,
the flock calls to each other, a dog barks, Mary Oliver-core,
politically neutral imagery unless some eco-anarchist killjoy
shows up to read into it.

As an adult clinging to this side of 40
you know freedom is the viral video you just watched:

Chicago, La Migra spots one delivery worker and swarms.
The man’s reflexes are faster than yours have ever been
as he runs with his bike, the wheels swerve, he dodges them,
still running he hops on the bike, legs pumping faster than an Olympian’s on those pedals,
and he’s off, the thugs shouting in a lumbering run behind him,
but the man on the bike is too fast, pedals blurring,
he’s around the corner and down the street,
his body becoming a dot in the distance as the fascists stumble and stop,
he’s too fast for the fascists, one of whom is wearing a white cowboy hat for fuck’s sake,
too fast for the Supreme Court and its recent verdict stating that
his brown skin is the only reason they need to grab him off the street in the first place.

Faster than I was when I did not apply for the gender on my passport
to be changed from ‘F’ to ‘M’ before the president’s executive order.
Now if we want/need to move to my wife’s home country,
we can’t do it as a married couple, I’ll have to find some other way
to emigrate, her country will not recognize the marriage of two ‘F’s
despite my beard, testosterone, masculine name.

You hope that this man in Chicago, caught on video by a stranger,
now become a hero, known online only as Chicago Bike Guy <3,
when the adrenaline faded from his body and left him shaking,
perhaps thinking of the fate narrowly avoided,
the concentration camps and slavery,
that which according to your childhood education,
Uncle Sam existed to save people from,
but so yes you
hope that his shakes subsided and he was able to eat his fill,
that grateful loving arms squeezed his torso until he became breathless again,
that he was told he was a hero, a movie star, a magical flying man,
Latin America’s magical realist literary movement in motion,
less a metaphor than the embodiment,

All of Steven Spielberg’s white children and
All the wingspans of all the birds in the world
Have nothing
On him.

Caio Major (he/him) is a Latino trans man and a graduate student in the MFA-Fiction program at Syracuse University. He has published fiction in Coffin Bell Journal and nonfiction in So To Speak intersectional feminist journal and Plentitudes literary journal. He lives in Syracuse with his wife and their dog, Bagel. You can read more of his writing at his blog, Second Adolescence.