Issue 11.1 Fall 2015

11.1 cover image

 

About the Author

Nigel Meyer is a junior majoring in Creative Writing at University of Southern Indiana. Should his poems be accepted it would be his first publication. Nigel lives in Evansville, Indiana.

 

Exodus to Granjeno, Texas

 

Nigel Meyer

 

 

All of the signs were there,
along the miles of fence.
Abuelo spoke to his burrito,
Where the Tex meets the Mex
he retold family history to me.

Cacti stood guard,
stood firm; yet
in loose sand
they said goodbye to
la casa de abuela,
the one she was raised
in, she’d died in. Broken,
buried by the fence, they left her.

The fence kept out rodents, Abuelo said,
they ate our hard work.

At the line they were reminded,
by the yellow triangles with commands, Halt!
by wired fences, policing their entry
they stood arms linked.

A million families,
everyone in the same boat
anchored to dried up wells
and a few pesos.

Back home our fence,
no longer chest-high
but a fortress wall.
How they climbed
and fell, crawled and snagged
the back of their clothes, under lines
protected, through the desert dust
a simple future.

 

 

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