About two and a half years ago, a photo of the drowned bodies of Oscar Martinez and his daughter was featured prominently in national newspapers; it was a bare and mute display of the consequences of our broken immigration system. Our administration has changed since then, but I don’t know that the problem has changed or that we’ve developed a fix. I’m sure my reaction was a common one: the young child attached to her father after a futile attempt to cross the Rio Grande was pitiable, but it also laid barE the unavoidable callousness of our own comfortable existences in the face of what we ordinarily force into an invisible corner. Mine was a quiet response, in part because of the enormity of what was happening in Texas, what has happened elsewhere in the past, and what continues to happen today, throughout the world.

Ford

imposibles rios

- Neruda

Fleuves impassibles

-Rimbaud

To cross this river, of many, to

cross,

interrogate the trees that look as

though

they’d flourish amid the

obliteration

of cities,

despite the tumult of

invective,

despite the grease of pleasantries,

something like justice

cut off at its knees, the chatter of ice

at estival festivities

you’d think indifference not possible

but tonight affords a river,

provides the eddies

in a dream, adrift in our beds,

in the current of a stream.