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  • Broken Initials, and: Crossing
  • Natalie Scenters-Zapico (bio)

Broken Initials

JAM and BT and MB and UTB and NSZ andyour name: JOSÉ ANGEL MALDONADO.

We leak from the ear, the nose, the brokentooth. We leak letters, small checkmark:

NO tuberculosis. I found your ten-year-oldface under the laminate of the border crosser

visa. Unstamped passport, ITINon a loose sheet of paper, a signature that isn’t

yours and isn’t your mother’s. A signatureof a man—his tongue missing, his mouth

a black hole that swallows each memoryof light. Every book you’ve read:

gone, missing, gone. The dogtooth on each J:gone. Wife’s name: NATALIE SCENTERS-ZAPICO

DE MALDONADO, to show commitment.Cashier’s check: 1,500 dollars paid

to homeland security. Check: 600 dollarspaid to photocopy machine, typewriter, and

Bertha, who stamped each page with an initial:JAM and BT and MB and UTB and NSZ. [End Page 58]

Bertha’s Immigration:We Are Not A Legal Service.

Crossing

You buy a passport made at a print shop for fifty dollars—perfectbut for a hair stuck in the laminate by your date of birth. Not noticeable,

you say and I believe you. We walk across the bridge to Juárezand I expect there to be an explosion—for the streets to glow red.

It’s been five years since we’ve been back and the city is a ghost—the traffic zooms. It still is a city, I say. Let’s go to a bar, you say.

We pose in faux fur with cigarettes for nightlife pictures, get vicious,and leave at 3 a.m. I stumble in my platform heels and stop

at another bar to get drinks one last time in a to-go cup. By 3:30I turn litterbug and throw our empties into the ink-stained street.

I brush my hands against the chain-link fence as we crossthe bridge back to El Paso. Cameras every ten feet—we smile

and kiss for them. Behind us a man yells, That’s it, that’s all you have for memurder capital of the world? U.S. border agents wave us across—

I’m too white to tell and you look clean enough, but one of us is Illegal.No one says a word—we all breathe pollution and blood clots. To think

we didn’t need to get a visa. To think we could have saved the fifty dollars.Still easy, we laugh and agree to cross again next weekend. We wonder

why we call each other Cielo, why we call each other Angel? We wonderhow two cities are split, how they grow. But mi amor, watch how they collide. [End Page 59]

Natalie Scenters-Zapico

Natalie Scenters-Zapico is from the sister cities of El Paso, Texas, and Ciudad Juárez, México. Her poetry has appeared in the Believer, Bellevue Literary Review, PALABRA, and more.

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