Boquillas Canyon Welcome 1978

Vincent Hostak

July 2, 2022

I am the lurker here and she’s no stranger

this landscape reports no borders

I, the morning hiker, she a knowing nomad

for whom nothing around is alien.

She collects her change of clothes

dried overnight upon huisache shrubs

carefully avoiding the cruel hook of its pins.

Her shift dress and socks

weigh little more than dry air 

good to fold away in a back-strung pack.

These may be worn the next day

for what sways upon her narrow frame

is worthy of more travel.

She thinks, “I can wait to enjoy

the sweet perfume pressed to these,

long into the sweaty hours.”

All trails here must be called a stretch

or a haul or a draw or a range

but are always nearly endless

like the length of the Rio Grande and

the rise of Sierra del Carmen.

Her family is somewhere on my side of the drink

¡Apúrate! ¡Apúrate! Ya nos tenemos que ir.

These wetlands, deserts, soft rock walls

embody whole a landscape of a state

the long unmapped region ahead

with its skin-deep veins of moisture

you can easily wade across.

The welcome sign is autonomic 

presented by the land not its holders.

Decades later, perhaps

free-passage vagaries won’t stand

and roaming here one day bright and early

the uniformed and badged 

will collect your grandchildren

like you did your airy frock and anklets.

Tus nietas caught and released to the elsewhere

abandoned like the Grizzly, like the Mexican Wolf.

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.