America Lies Across the Rio Grande Reading Frost
While They Seek Funding on Border Security
by Ariana D. Den Bleyker

They build to exclude—
the unwelcome, unwanted, uninvited—
bodies scaling over it.

What it is to love the gray morning, sky muddled overhead,
shimmering across a fence dressed in mirrors:

shadows pitch dark on the brink of catastrophe, looming
against the hillside—nothing stirred or measured

by the miles of space from one side to the other
but height of the fence

or the thickness,
or the presence
or absence of barbed wire,
or the silence on top.

Look closer: here she is, sharing
the same space, sleeping
in the same bed, separated

only by distance
& a formidable fence between.

 

 

About the Poet: Ariana D. Den Bleyker is a Pittsburgh native currently residing in New York’s Hudson Valley where she is a wife and mother of two. When she’s not writing, she’s spending time with her family and every once in a while sleeps. She is the author of three collections, eighteen chapbooks, three crime novellas, a novelette, and an experimental memoir. She hopes you’ll fall in love with her words.