People Who Work Here Don’t Work Here

The hook timing was off on my Jukibut my Brother was roiling. In the spirit of secrets,

let me tell you—I overheard my supervisor spit to her boss:

“Where were you while we were getting high on bilingual employees?”Another scraper comes off the molder in the maquila next door.

I was hired here, at the fabrica, because I could receive a pronunciation. The border, my boss,never apologizes because the border wants what we all want: crowds combed with guest workers waiting

in line. We’re dial tones. My boss saysall work’s tied up in the wreath of our times. And the wreath is me, Primitiva. I’m a visual story

sold by the manufacturer. A maquila needs fiction to run.

So they need my story, duh.

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Primitivo hears his thock in the data entry hut. All his friends are also known for their thock.When customs presses their key

the crosser responds with pleasing soundsletting customs know their entry was recorded.

When Primitivo and his friends make dull thocks

they’re not allowed to pass into simulation. Instead, they’re sent to the desert to find ones (loved/enemies/frenemies) bags of stuff (lighters, pedialyte, deodorant).

I particularly want to highlight the roll-on stick.

Primitivo’s friends care about their smell, their hair, there, there.

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I can’t offer you solstice. No, solace. So please, don’t cry inside me again.    Customs lets you into simulation if you’re polished inside and out.

This crosser’s inside is un-polishable because it’s a room the crosser can’t find.I’m the crosser and the room I live in

has two entrances. A situation that’s been imprinted on me and here’s the situation: I can’t write a border    better than the real border.

      I’m instructed by customs to open the room      that is easiest to access in my mind’s eyeand my mind’s eye is a car show from Robaron Fest. You steal timebut please never buy it. Customs will give you so much time that you won’t have any of it.Customs talks and talks in the kiosk about the same landscape:

a fabrica that skirts and preys on wages. Those dollar signs are the fabric that shape our skirt.We make the fabric, we make the landscape and then, we make the day. All day you’re on the line

and you have to live in other people’s thoughts.

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There’s more truth and untruth about the border.

How do you feel so hungry and full at the same time?

The past, like the border, is its own country.

You bring a camcorder into the maquila so that later you can relive your dissonance.

Woops, relieve your dissonance. It’s hard to tell.

I’ll have to quit. Other people’s thoughtsare the Juki’s I’d love to leave in the past.

Our ID cards are decorative till the end of our shift. We switch offwith someone else, another worker who will wipe the serenade from our eyes.

Among us crossers, it’s hard to tell who’s built a fence. A series of mythsabout being called in early sweeps through the work floor.