Illegals
Jeanie Sanders
September 17, 2023
In Big Bend in the 1960s stepping
from one country into another
wasn’t even marked
by the distance a shadow makes
on the flow of the River.
Nor marked by a body
half washed by the trickle of water
with one shoe to make the marker.
A man in his mid twenties but then
who can tell after time.
Not the River as its slow inch deep current
drags at his hair.
Our shadows cover the width of
the River he died in.
What’s in his pockets?
A loved one’s picture or
rose petals from home
coming to life again in the water.
His hand reaching out
one foot in the old world
one foot in the new.
Jeanie Sanders is a poet and collage artist. She lives in Lytle, Texas. Her poems have been published in The Texas Observer, San Antonio Express-News, Texas Poetry Calendar, Passager, La Voz de Esperanza, and several anthologies. She has two books of poetry, The Book of the Dead: Poems and Photographs and The Dispossessed.
