Poetry and Arts | NLF Categories

Second Attempt Crossing

For Chino In the middle of that desert that didn’t look like sand and sand only, in the middle

This is for Amal, whose name means hope, who thinks of each tree she’s planted like a child, whose family

To hold the bird and not to crush her, that is the secret. Sand turned too quickly to cement and

We ate labneh and bread in your tents When we had no water we drew it from your well Your

I am 15. It is the summer of 1982. I’m working illegally at the Sonic Drive-In. Weatherford, Oklahoma. I

We’re running out of O2 screaming down the southwest freeway in the rain the nurse-practitioner and me rocking around the

Stuart talked to me in dreams so real I believed in God for those three years. In the first one,

I saw the bastard webslinging over electric Soho, miles above the stoplights and New Yorkers. What I wouldn’t give to

A century of silence is violence. * That winter a blizzard, a cold that crawled over the Sangre de Cristo

The border is a line that birds cannot see. The border is a beautiful piece of paper folded carelessly in

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