Los Colores de Paso del Norte (The Colors of Paso del Norte)
Vincent Hostak
September 24, 2023
On the Paso del Norte bridge
the blue of truth turns a faded grey,
the color young Federales once wore
before these days of desert camouflage.
It’s the color of girders reflected in the Rio Grande.
We could walk across borders once, see the occupation:
those white-grey blisters on chocolate-red waters
for as long as the sun blanched the river’s skin,
which was almost always.
This color, on the patches of a Spanish Mustang,
tints each knee to each heel,
bespeckles its ochre flesh
draped across its uphill build.
It’s the blue in the Dylan song,
his misadventure in the borderland
(one we were too young to even hope to have).
You might find the color on a paint chip:
“Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blue” (sic).
Wasn’t the wind whistling that tune
on the bridge during a fray between
the Westerlies and the Trade Winds?
We, too, were “lost in Juarez”
sporting the colors and tells of foolish
Anglo kids from the Northeast side,
denim and deerskin fringed cadets.
What were we to find?
Shellacked brown toads in tight tango embraces,
an alabaster chess set with its
badly buffed Gandalf king,
pirated cassettes with poorly translated labels.
You said, they saw us coming, but also,
were just trying to make a living.
That Mustang might still roam
some unpatrolled, cholla freckled
public canyon land, grazing
along the margins of a playa
Far from the curio-seeking tender teens,
parades of plaza mariachis,
all-to-easy to procure Carta Blancas
chilled with a strong taste of can, these
places were more than we could imagine,
and now, more than we ever should.
Razor wire in the Rio Grande,
deadly palisades between kindness and hostility
making orphans of children in their sway.
There are shadows starker than crisp reflections
dwelling in all our neighbors’ eyes and a pale
“floating barrier” that scars our common flesh.
Vincent Hostak is a writer and media producer from Texas now living near the Front Range of Colorado south of Denver. His recently published poems are found in the journals Sonder Midwest and the Langdon Review of the Arts in Texas and as a contributor to the TPA. He writes & produces the podcast: Crossings-the Refugee Experience in America.
