By Alberto Ríos
I grew up on the border and though I left
I have brought it with me wherever I've gone.
Its line guides me, this long, winding thread of memory.
The border wasn't as big as they say—
It fit neatly behind my eyes and between my ears—
It guides me still, I know, but it is not a compass.
It is not a place out there but a place in here.
I catch on its barbed wire in both places.
It is a line I step over and a ledge I duck under.
I have looked underneath its skirts, and it has caught me—
Many times. We're old friends and we play the game well.
When someone says border, now, or frontera, or the line.
La línea, or the fence, or whatever else
We name the edge and the end of things—
I hear something missing in the words,
The what it all used to be. Its name does not include its childhood.
I grew up liking the border and its great scar,
Its drama always good for a story the way scars always are.
A scar is the place where the hurting used to be.
A scar the heroic signature of the healed.
The border is not a scar. Instead, it is something we keep picking at,
Something that has no name.
The border I knew was something with a history.
But this thing now, it is a stranger even to itself.
Alberto Rios, "Border Boy" from Not go away is my name. Copyright © 2020 by Alberto Rios. Reprinted by permission of Copper Canyon Press, www.coppercanyonpress.org.
Source: Not go away is my name (2020)
Poet Bio
More By This Poet
We Are of a Tribe
We plant seeds in the ground
And dreams in the sky,
Hoping that, someday, the roots of one
Will meet the upstretched limbs of the other.
It has not happened yet.
We share the sky, all of us, the whole world:
Together, we are a tribe...
Rabbits and Fire
Everything’s been said
But one last thing about the desert,
And it’s awful: During brush fires in the Sonoran desert,
Brush fires that happen before the monsoon and in the great,
Deep, wide, and smothering heat of the hottest months,
The longest months,
The hypnotic, immeasurable...
More Poems about Living
Spring Snow
A spring snow coincides with plum blossoms.
In a month, you will forget, then remember
when nine ravens perched in the elm sway in wind.
I will remember when I brake to a stop,
and a hubcap rolls through the intersection.
An angry man grinds...
At the Equinox
The tide ebbs and reveals orange and purple sea stars.
I have no theory of radiance,
but after rain evaporates
off pine needles, the needles glisten.
In the courtyard, we spot the rising shell of a moon,
and,...
More Poems about Social Commentaries
i love you to the moon &
not back, let’s not come back, let’s go by the speed of
queer zest & stay up
there & get ourselves a little
moon cottage (so pretty), then start a moon garden
with lots of moon veggies (so healthy), i mean
i was already moonlighting
as...
Self-Portrait with Sylvia Plath’s Braid
Some women make a pilgrimage to visit it
in the Indiana library charged to keep it safe.
I didn’t drive to it; I dreamed it, the thick braid
roped over my hands, heavier than lead.
My own hair was long for years.
Then I became...