The Commissioner closed points of entry,

turned to the prophets of policy, their suits

hungry for order and control, eyes

on elections to come, they nodded

approval, certain the searing heat, hostile

terrain would provide a moral alibi

for suffering of others and when bodies

fell along the corridors of death traversing

the great stillness of the Southwest deserts,

they labelled them unintended, denied

complicity, transformed men, women,

children into bare life subject to violence

without retribution, their lives taken

without consequence, the Sonoran and Chihuahuan

rendered a sprawling graveyard

of the newly dead, skeletons, fragments,

numbers vast and uncertain.

Now, we wait for the lips of leaders

to finally stop moving, for sanitized words

stacked high on the altars of security and fear

to be crushed by the sheer weight

of human conscious and empathy.

We wait.

Backpacks

They surround us, barely noticed, sprawled on the floor of classrooms, strung over the shoulders of students streaming across campuses, seemingly insignificant containers of books, lecture notes and pieces of knowledge, but some scatter on vast and deadly desert floors, lie next to water bottles, hang from Ironwoods and Mesquites in remote places, branches bending under their weight, some empty, faded from the sun, ripped at the seams, left behind, some with supplies like cans of tuna, beans, a wallet, a pair of shoes, a love letter, photos of family, holy cards with images of Jesus Christ, prayers printed on the back that promise a quicker trip to heaven and if you listen to the absences you might hear heartbeats around these backpacks, your own and a sad symphony of pulses of those who carried the packs, and I have tried to do this, to write about these backpacks, feeling they were crucial to understand, like the shoes piled high at the Holocaust Museum in D.C. and I have always failed to come close enough to their silences.