This is a poem I submitted to “Borderlands:Texas Poetry Review” who summarily rejected it. I thought it was pretty good, myself – kind of portraying a border town. I’m not sure what they didn’t like about it, but it’s OK – I’ve never bought their magazine and so what the hell; they can do whatever they like. I thought about writing them something mean for the rejection, like you might say to a girl at the 8th grade dance who declines your request to dance. Somehow, “I didn’t want to be published in your magazine anyway!” didn’t seem to work for this situation as well as it had in 8th grade. Anyway, I just found it tooling around and thought I didn’t have it anywhere else on the site, so what the hell.
where we lived, the mesquite would rise into the afternoon air after the rains; cardboard cages rose across the river painted in swirling pinks and yellows with their occupants milling the hills down under their bare feet. where we lived, the junkies shot up in the alley behind our garage trying to find heaven in the last frontier; wondering how it was they got here and why their cage wasn't painted as beautifully as the poverty across the river. Where we lived, I was different so that the school girls would come out of their cages to touch my golden yellow hair and their brothers/cousins/uncles would yell behind them, "Pinche guero!" where we lived, everyone spoke Spanish; no one spoke to each other, instead preferring to speak to the world with each lost breath from too many days under the border sun, beating down hard upon our backs, sapping the drive. where we lived, kindness was a rag dangling from the fence of an abandoned lot and love was held in the can that the children kicked about until the oldest would yell "GOOAAAALLLL!!!", expiring the celebration as his breath ended. where we lived, the desert was forever and our lives only a grain in that eternity; no matter how much you needed to escape, or how long you'd been in line at the bus station, that desert was made of our bones; they would all be sand, and I would no longer be any different.