Featured image: Setting by Sam Hume for Abraham and Issac, A. & C. [Arts and Crafts] Theatre, Detroit, from the The New York Public Library
Chromogenic color print 2015.4, by Yubi Suarez
i.
The father’s face in Adi Nes color print
Is full of hopelessness while he pushes a grocery cart
His little boy sleeps as though he is in a safe place
Protected by his fathers’ strong dirty hands
He sleeps while traveling to his next adventure
The boy is oblivious of the fear his father holds in his broken heart
The boy with bare feet and dirty clothes lays like Jesus Christ ready to be sacrificed
A plastic bag with more plastic bags inside
As if they will be going to recycle the plastics before nightfall
The road they’re traveling on is lonely and embarrassing
The sun is going down – The Father with anxiety pushes his cart wondering
Will he be bereaved that night?
ii.
In 1997 I knew that as a 23-year-old mother
I will have to face many new challenges
My son was diagnosed with hydronephrosis at birth
I remember walking down the hospitals skywalk to hand him over
to the nurse for another renal scan
The pain in his face while I sacrificed
his little body to such torture
Strapped down like Jesus Christ with sandbags on his arms and feet
They inject a blue dye into his catheter
While crying & throwing up – the nurse throws her fat body on top of him
Just so that her renal scan results would be accurate
I wanted to jump on top of her like a lioness
But as a scared young mother, I had to just sit back and watch him suffer
Twice a month until he was 15 months old
One day on that hospital’s skywalk I couldn’t take the pain anymore
I fell to my knees and held my boy in my arms
while people passed me by and looked at me as though I was crazy.
I screamed as Jacob did in Genesis 43-14
“If I am to be Bereaved of my children– I shall be Bereaved!”
That day I left my son as a sacrifice on God’s altar a month later my son was miraculously healed!
The Key to the Jail Cell, by Daniel E. Suarez
I gave you the key – the sage that protects my heart
Once you open the door to my safe
The darkness and cold will be replaced
Now filled with warmth and love
Inside these cold cell walls
My heart is very different
My heart is no longer filled with blood
My heart is filled with fear
You alone hold this key to my safe
Hold my heart gentle and be afraid to break it
Once upon a time I was broken pieces
Left alone for so long
Through so many seasons
Seeking understanding
Asking God to show reasons
Placing my heart in your hands
Only for this reason
Will I be here for the 120 years?
Or will my God create in me a clean heart and free his servant one day?
Ecclesiastes 3:4 a time to weep, and a time to laugh
Today I choose to laugh a lot and be Mr. Positive
Yubi Suarez is a Milwaukee native, half of a century old, and mother of two! She calls her children Yazi & Soso, but their birth certificate reads Yazaret & Daniel Suarez. She is freely married for 29 years with Danny Suarez and a grandmother of three beautiful angels. Yubi is enrolled in the EPP Program at Marquette University, accepting her second chance in life. For the last 8 years she managed a commercial roofing company. Today she’s a broken-hearted mother, helping her 26-year-old son, who has been awaiting trial since Jan 2023. She asks the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob protect her son on this new Altar! “God will provide me a Ram!”
The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Photography Collection, The New York Public Library. “Setting by Sam Hume for Abraham and Issac, A. & C. [Arts and Crafts] Theatre, Detroit.” The New York Public Library Digital Collections. 1860 – 1920. https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/64987c40-c619-012f-93bc-58d385a7bc34.