A state patrol cruiser idles on the gravel,
grille gawping at me. I am shivering,
a body’s length distant from my husband
and his brother, who wait at attention
in my car. They’ve summoned the will
to look away. “Do you know these men,
Ma’am?” the trooper asks. He doesn’t say Mexicans,
but that’s what he means. He flipped a U-turn
when he saw their brown faces
with me, Anglo-pale, driving a dented Volvo
down a Texas highway so close to Mexico.
“Yes, sir,” I say, forcing each syllable
into the shape of politeness. “You can see
my husband’s American Mexican name
on the registration.” I want him to know
I know why he stopped us, though he claims
he clocked my car at five miles too fast.
My disordered words might cost me extra minutes
in the frozen air but jail might be the starting price
for the men with me if the trooper takes offense.
Here in South Texas, men of the law lynched men
with brown skin, some set ablaze, some whipped,
some simply hanged. They died by bullets too;
a Marine felled a boy as he tended his goats.
Do not give them an excuse to harm you,
my husband would warn our son
in their talks about police. Power?
You have none when race is the border.
I would remind him: Hoping to protect you,
we sealed my Anglo surname
into the middle of your Latino name.
The trooper’s name is stitched
on his jacket: Garcia.
Maybe he will empathize. Maybe
he’ll despise with a convert’s passion.
Garcia ambles to his cruiser, lingers
on his screen, maybe scrolling dossiers
of our surveilled lives. What’s taking so long?
Maybe his radio has relayed the time
my husband was locked up at the Canadian
line for sharing his name with an Italian
terrorist. An agent from Texas finally freed him,
hearing no Italian in his border Spanish.
Maybe Garcia has learned a midwife
coaxed the brothers into the world
near this stretch of inhospitable mesquite.
Lately this border-birth tradition has brought
handcuffs and canceled passports;
a midwife’s signature on a birth certificate
no longer proves citizenship to those
who would make America blanca again.
My body contracts against a shank of wind
that slices over the barrow pit.
The brothers wait, still tensed.
