by Suzette Bishop
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| A former Border Patrol agent who confessed to killing four sex workers in 2018 was convicted Wednesday of capital murder, after jurors heard recordings of him telling investigators he was trying to "clean up the streets" of his South Texas hometown. —NPR, December 7, 2022 |
God loves you, she tells him
When he says he wants to kill himself,
And he shoots her
Along I-35,
The road I’ve taken
Countless times out of Laredo.
The woman who escapes his truck
And Border Patrol-issued gun
Leaves him grasping her shirt
At the gas station
Around the corner from me.
He lives in a nearby subdivision
In the newer, shinier part of town
Built on ranch land belonging to a Mexican family
When this was Mexico,
In litigation for years, sold for almost nothing.
She coaxes him to take her to get cigarettes
When the realization he’s the one who killed the others
Pricks her like cactus.
San Bernardo where he picked up
Prostitutes is further south
Off I-35.
You’ll find rundown motels,
Mid-century nostalgia,
A few restaurants
Including at least one that served both food
And, unbeknownst to us, women,
Another where the waiter
Would wait until my husband went to the restroom
To meet my eyes,
Nod knowingly, even walked over once
To tell me I’m pretty,
Running after us one evening in the parking lot
With some special smoothie
He made just for me.
He was gone the next time we went there.
Spilling out of Olive Garden
At the mall across the highway
After a work luncheon,
A woman begged us for money.
I gave her my styrofoam of leftovers,
But I knew it wasn’t enough,
No shade offered from the palm trees
Cordoning off our oasis from
Heroin alley,
This road,
Bait,
This moment of telling her,
You could be my wife, now,
Live in this house she left,
Following the underpasses
And drainage ditches.
Flooring it
To a nicer road built on stolen desert.
When the woman escapes,
He drives home, arms the place,
Guns and ammo laid out on the kitchen island’s granite
And speeds out onto the highway again,
The section where you can hear teens
Drag race.
He catches two more victims
Before he’s caught,
Throwing their bodies like trash
Along the highway.
He said it was to clean up the streets.
A student wrote about one victim, a relative,
Addicted, her children were raised by her mother,
Rehab hadn’t worked,
But they still loved her,
Told the children she loved them
And would get better,
Couldn’t believe how she’d died,
Left alone in buzzing scrub brush.
On Sundays, teenagers
show off their muscle cars
Along San Bernardo,
Police having to direct traffic,
Kids calling to each other out the windows,
Sometimes saying everything we want to hear,
Probably some of these women, once.
Suzette Bishop has published three poetry books and two chapbooks, including her most recent chapbook, Jaguar’s Book of the Dead. Her poems have appeared in many journals and anthologies. She lives with her husband and two cats.