A Merchant
Edgar Ulloa Lujan

I’ve crossed xenophobic rivers
gone back and forth to our home, our home,

right on the street of Magdalena River,
with simple furnishings purchased in El Paso

(Sun City) where El Pasoans say the sun shines better,
not knowing that where it hits is in Juárez

across the imaginary line separating brothers and sisters,
where forty percent of streets are sand, where it’s a landscape of maquiladoras

(assembly plants) — a foreign capital to create first-world
salaries out of the Mexican workers.