Today's poem is by Xavier Cavazos

        Anaphora, chiasmus, diacope, polyptoton
Rhetorical Figures & a Bullet
        crossing the border.

My brothers and sisters are dying in train cars. Overcome
by one-hundred-degree days, my brothers

and sisters die. They are carried like cargo
along Interstate 8 in the trunks of automobiles

as American as piñatas in the aisles of Walmart in rural towns
across the Midwest. My brothers and sisters are carrying

the weight of return tickets to Mexico, Cuba, Guatemala,
Nicaragua, Honduras El Salvador. They need us to care.

My brothers and sisters are being shot at
in Mexico while thinking of crossing the border in San Ysidro,

named for the patron saint of farmers near San Diego.
My brothers and sisters are bleeding to death

from gunshot wounds by American border patrol agents
in El Paso, Texas. They have bled

from chest wounds, from shoulder wounds, from leg wounds,
from wounds left open, my brothers and sisters bleed.

On June 8, 2010, a fifteen-year-old Mexican citizen
was shot to death on the Mexican side of the border near El Paso.

Passport stampless! Bullets, bullets! Passport stampless!

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Copyright © 2024 Xavier Cavazos All rights reserved
from The Devil's Workshop
Cleveland State University Poetry Center
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission

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