The Borderland (Recessive Gene)
Reporter’s Note: This is journalism in verse, an example of what I call my “reportorial poetry.”
Part I — This Side of the Border
A slap, a rock to the door
opens mother’s eyes, swept behind
the rotting wood planks
of a front porch and four walls
with a blue tarp for a roof,
the tilt in the living room where
children feed children
into the molded bathroom where
the faucet drips all night
to the bedroom a step across the lip
of nails coming loose as lips lock:
a man swings into the home, an interpreter,
a paid interloper;
drops a crumpled yellow slip
of paper, a notice, a date — barks –
Don’t Be Late.
Prelude
(he was licensed to translate by the courts
and hired by the owner to clear out
this immigrant home before the fines + fees
and city’s attorneys evicted the slumlord
himself)
Mother visited The Center, pregnant daughter
present to recount the night in English.
She handed me a photocopy, a letterhead of owner apologies
before speaking her first word, a child, she still was
mimicking what she’d seen on TV
about how to communicate
with the body, the face,
with hands and feet,
neck and waist …
the letter prepped tenants
for the city’s targeted strikes
on the Lord of House Pets,
and families stuck in rent, like this family,
like two-thirds of in-town residents,
poor whites and blacks, equal
in their misplaced shame,
and first-generation immigrants
from Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala,
the disparate colored speech stitched
by work together as field and factory hands
in the Poultry Capitol of the U.S.A.,
and by the economics of paying “market rate”
on a “substandard unit.” All the pols thought
it was about time to clean up these decayed
neighborhoods. But no thought about the price
of clearing ruins, memories, and the fallout,
which the council called a tradeoff,
that would come alongside the repairs
as exiles stood in for re-housing.
So,
these renovations really began the shift
to open midtown for “mixed-use” investment
and development, which the public applauded,
‘Oh, how nice!’ at their own expense
even as their neighbors moved on,
the reasons known, propelled
by the gathering of riches
and everyone just shaking their heads,
saying, ‘Ain’t it a shame. A pity.
But what to do?’
Overture
(but a former sheriff’s deputy turned
activist, her name not important, she said,
castigated the landlord and his attorney
outside the courtroom for running eviction
proceedings on the family, even
if the city was forcing his hand with threats
and a largesse of demands.
The former deputy, she said, “You’re giving
this family an extra month to stay
and figure out where they’ll sleep next …
we know what you did, and if you don’t agree to this,
then we’ll take the case before the judge.”
Well,
the landlord doesn’t mind trouble — that’s his business,
after all — but some trouble isn’t worth it. Even he knew
meritocracy is a sham, so the wealthiest attorney
around, known for public monologues
at the council podium, always airing his stature
and wearing his state around his neck,
was shown what’s it like when someone
won’t take his or his client’s shit
and how fairness works
when contracts are cut up, spat on.
This was his chance to be the gatekeeper,
and take the keys from those paying
for need
but he was shown
his own needs through the reflection
of the glasses on his surprised frozen face
with cavernous eyes and twisted-on nose,
with ears falling off when not listening
to the ground, the dirt, the molten
earth)
Meanwhile, mother’s boyfriend
checking into probation, a public
drunk, nothing more and
nothing to be said
for law’s disguise
when agents hold
the door for him
could be on the chicken — -cutting line
under running time
standing next to
a kitchen hand, a father, at his
other part-time job,
a day laborer laying columns
for a house
for another family
other lives will rest in
no bribes here, only
send change home
from bodega
across border
to a barrio where
abuelos live –
and the millennial kids here
are citizens, the true
remittance.
Part II — The Highway
Rolling down Nogales Highway
to meet a one-legged man swinging a crutch for a buck
Rolling down Nogales Highway
to meet a street vendor deported for overstaying his welcome
Is it a spate, is it a trend, is it the rest of our lives!?
Rolling down Nogales Highway
to meet a blind man singing sweetly in the customs line
Rolling down Nogales Highway
to meet an ex-con running from America for breaking legs again
Is it a spate, is it a trend, is it the rest of our lives!?
Rolling down Nogales Highway
to meet a grandmother hawking blankets with persuasive pity
Rolling down Nogales Highway
to meet a young boy learning the tricks of good salesmanship
Is it a spate, is it a trend, is it the rest of our lives!?
Interlude I
(it was a coincidence that I arrived
on the Arizona-Mexico border the day
after a “national emergency” was declared
by a president swinging for adulation. I’d already
planned to rescue a dropout friend/fiend
on the streets of Phoenix.
Anyways,
that official declaration of invasion
would have been an unwitting admission of fault
had the claims carried factual resonance,
had the rhetoric not looked like a cotton-stuffed wolf
stalking a puppet-stringed boy, but the façade nibbles
on ideological toes and lulls deceivers
with warnings + proclamations that they’re true believers
with calls to prayer + talk of escort deportation
But I
crossed easy into the hysterical sleaze
like some poorly written tragicomedy,
and then seesawed between
a sunbaked land and black winds
moving in as kids sold tart candy,
as open-air cookers suffocated senses,
as pharmacies restocked pills + plastics
and managers made twice-daily/bank-runs
passing by fugitive migrants
from Norte Americano
here to show us
the borderland
is not six-inches wide
but six-feet deep)
Rolling down Nogales Highway
to meet a family kissing through a fence
Rolling down Nogales Highway
to watch a bust for moving people along
Is it a spate, is it a trend, is it the rest of our lives!?
Rolling down Nogales Highway
to watch indigenous cut-up prickly pear cactus
Rolling down Nogales Highway
to count loose change and tally the has-beens
Is it a spate, is it a trend, is it the rest of our lives!?
Part III — The Wall
He used to work for the utility, wild dogs
in the desert wash tightwalking telephone
lines. Between here and Altar Valley
lie dozens of Indian roadside graves,
Catholic converted in name,
shrines to Mary who lost her
virginity in the dragnet,
in a car wreck or maybe
it’s all just a tourist attraction.
Rising from the desert basement
to the mountain green
and sheltered by granite,
a slow trickling stream
over slick gray rock, cutting up
the topography, cutting up
the first migrant family.
Interlude II
(i traveled so much barenaked, empty, exposed
and wide-flanking broad-open desert, where the O’odham
natives and Latinos and Anglos mix bread and blood, but
what really connected them, the only thing really,
was the land, the dirt and rock and sand and brush.
But for some, a footpath is more than a single track
to get away, a route to power, or two lanes
running parallel, heading in the same direction
but at different speeds, and never daring to cross …)
Rusted slats, a brush to the sky,
smearing synesthetic names
along a snarling horizon
of fumes shimmering like gloss in the heat,
along a borderline sneering
like a birthmark or piercing
on the face of a young one,
and between the inches
a grandmother y nieta
can be seen kissing
under a Coca-Cola sign
next to the currency exchange.
The border porous, wringing
light through graffiti breath
and bleached prayers left
for electric fans to blow away,
but like beauty and ruin
together again
stories are reported of a deportation
stayed, an entry granted, then smugglers
dumping babies just over the line,
and words that are dyed
color after color
when passed along
the wireless line,
the social media check
dancing with time
and thoughts dyed
in coded dreams, each sting of fear
seeping under, over and through
the fence, the border, the wall,
whatever it’s called.
Part IV — That Side of the Border
The taste of the streets boiling
in the heat, food and spit blends
with car exhaust — authentic, you’re told.
The smell is caught in the hand-sewn
orange/and/black blanket I sleep on, it’s caught
in the cathedral where passersby nod
and bow, and sweeps through
the fence slats
to prick the nose
on the American side.
I was chilled in the gray of the faded blacktop streets
under the gray overcast morning sky
with gray sign poles telling me to stop
and gray tree trunks bending to speak.
Interlude III
(sitting with denizens of tent camps
lining border turnstiles, alone in the talk
I could only make out a few desires at a time,
but the feeling, the dreadful sense of imp/ending death
kept me coming back for the finale — someone gives in
or someone takes over, but the lingering will stop
and the applause will distract
when the calendars flip enough pages –
I just can’t count that high
or yet picture the future. I wonder
if immigrants know how
to live beyond time)
The smell is sweet, it stinks, it smiles
on me and drains to the sea,
an omen for a new beginning,
born of blood, a perfume of
faded love.
The taste is endemic, an artifact,
grabbing ahold of the past
with suffocating smoke,
an aroma you taste but cannot
tame, or wall off, or relate
by word of mouth.
Asleep in the sound
of drinking songs
spinning around
satellites overhead
beaming, slinging
pictures of sticky streets,
of sticky hands
feeding
one another.
Part V — Skirting on Ice
Packed on ice, pulled from the blue crushed
shaved frost — fine obscurity,
finite eternity of belief.
Packed on ice, thrust into the shattering
frozen surf — the winds are insistent,
no distant relief.
Cadence
(indiscriminate discretion
moving in from the north
heading back east and out west
and rising from the deepest south
where it originally nests;
paranoia, mass raids
hysteria, album names,
polleras, hieleras,
the pace is swift
tearing us
no grievance heard
the newsreel spins
the plot unsure
and the river between us
churns the search,
the money,
the chance)
Packed on ice, shipped from the white center
chiseled core — dirtied delivery,
a misery foretold.
Packed on ice, deadened in the falling snow
bitter cooled — the melt is coming,
frigid slumming ground.
Part VI — Exile
I don’t write about these things
anymore. I left my pen at the border
and the newspaper is now a pillow
when I sleep beneath the skyscraper/rented
deadend/streets. But I’m moving. Boxes
taped shut, marked with the names
of its goods. Past. Present. Future.
All my looks over the shoulder
gone. I’m off to another county, or state
of mind, off the hook of curled fingers
calling me their way
from the railroad ties
to the council hall
where I was drowned
in the namechecks and double takes
and some mister who thinks
he has a lead on a story
about the color of blood
inside the body;
but I’m just thinking
about the borderland that shot me
and soaked my sleeves
with migrating memories.
Part VII — The Return
Outro
(they’re bringing in psychologists for
the psychics to work out their problems,
and when the social workers need a therapist,
when the journalist must turn off the TV,
when the ambulance driver needs a refill on gas,
when the heart surgeon paints the vessels black …
that’s when I’m coming back)
