BY MARÍA ESQUINCA
A border patrol agent asks an immigrant:
¿Quién te va ayudar ahora?
The immigrant curls his lips
into the shape of God,
says,
Dios.
BP responds:
Dios no existe aquí.
And a wound in the shape
of a cross reblossoms.
BP stuffs immigrants
inside a room built for
35,
with 155.
No shampoo.
No toothpaste.
The wall opens
its mouth,
poisoned scorpions
crawl out.
BP calls immigrants pigs.
La frontera is a scab
that never leaves the skin.
Merciless men pretend militia,
point their rifles
at a scared family, they say:
We have to go back to Hitler days
and put them all in a gas chamber.
History will write their crimes
as patriotism.
Rosaries fall in effigy
from the sky.
The clouds paint
their faces with skulls,
echo the names
of the nameless.
The local recycling plant burns,
and today’s news is reborn.
God unravels, a nimbus
of dust and ash. Grimes
the sky grey, grey, grey,
sees Óscar Alberto Martínez Ramírez
and his 23-month-old daughter, Angie Valeria, float
face-down the Rio Grande. Gris. Gris. Gris.
And isn’t it ironic?
Weeks ago, dozens of Cubans
yell for help from a make-shift fence
under the bridge, and we walked by.
But the fire makes us stop the car.
Pull over. We take a picture
of the towering smoke.
Awed by that spectacular violence,
indifferent to the other.
The desert extinguishes
God’s body. It fills and falls.
A soundless symphony.
María Esquinca is a poet and journalist. Her poetry has appeared in Waxwing, The Florida Review, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Cream City Review, and others. Her book reviews and interviews have appeared in Adroit Journal and ANMLY. A fronteriza, she was born in Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, México and mostly grew up in El Paso, Texas.