Sara Borjas – Maybe we all don’t really come from anywhere but come from running through

Sara Borjas

Maybe we all don’t really come from anywhere but come from running through

lands where we weren’t wanted or didn’t want ourselves and maybe it’s not a land maybe it’s an idea maybe it’s a kind of tree or road or love my grandma drove her kids across a country in a blue pick-up truck and slapped my mother every sixty miles for looking like the man they were leaving he was boring she said never danced had his two thumbs in his belt loops on the side of the makeshift dance floor in Rio Grande maybe she left him because she was fleeing stillness stone sometimes I think I notice it inside her sometimes she’s tough to love my mom says she wishes my grandma had a cell phone so she could text her I love you because she can’t say it to her face maybe I’m from that that hole in my mother’s throat open like a dirt road maybe it’s the road my mom told me about the one way in El Paso her and my grandpa would drive the Chevy down collecting aluminum cans toss them into a sack so they could eat how it was the only time she has used fond and memory together maybe that’s where I come from that distance between what she thinks love is and what she got and maybe I’m the dirt under her feet the trapped breath she runs along back and forth between her mother’s hand and her face back & forth between her father’s thumbs & the dance floor back & forth between her girlhood and mine