WHAT WE WANT TO HEAR

by Suzette Bishop

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. 

MASSASOIT’S DAUGHTER, MIONEAIME

by Suzette Bishop

Massasoit Sachem or Ousamequin (c. 1581 – 1661) was the sachem or leader of the Pokanoket sachemship. Massasoit means Great Sachem. It was he who allied his people with the Plymouth colonists. Massasoit had five children, among them daughter Mioneaime later called Amie. Above: Statue of Chief Massasoit by Cyrus Edwin Dallin, 1861-1944 Bronze (posthumous casting) Gift of the James F. Dicke Family, Dayton Art Institute, Dayton, Ohio

On your deathbed

You tell me and my sister and brothers

To make friends with the white man.

We look at each other,

Unease in our eyes,

But nod.

Why would we do this?

Nothing is the same since

They floated into the horizon,

My gathering of mussels

Not the same,

Brief season of warm sand I loved.

So few of us after the sickness,

Flurries, wind, saltwater,

But I knew who I was,

I knew where I belonged.

Even the ones who saved your life once

Are not friends,

Will not own us if we marry among them,

Have children,

I won’t recognize their children’s children, either,

Not the one writing this poem

Not in our language.

You drift away,

                                And I see us as driftwood carved by wind,

                                                                    Remnants of how we lived.

Enemies to the North

Like the heavy storms descending

And the sickness gave you no choice

But to offer peace, welcome, alliance, land,

 

Our seed,

And blue-black shells

Discarded, unused,

Their beauty unseen,

 What I see in the future with our friends.

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.

SOUND AND FURY FROM UVALDE

by Suzette Bishop

I hear it from a two hours’ drive north,

From just below the scenic Texas Hill Country,

The scream of first getting the news

Their loved one was gunned down

Merged into one long, piercing, repeating sound,

Before a storm barrels southward,

Hail starting up slowly,

Then shaking the cathedral ceiling,

Our windows,

Animals running for cover.

We’ve driven through the small town,

Stopped to get gas,

Know a couple people who went to the junior college

On barrel racing scholarships,

Heard the grandson of someone from work survived.

A heart-stopped moment in class once

With the popping sound down the hall,

Two students, a veteran and FBI agent, meeting my eyes,

The veteran immediately slamming the door shut.

He always sat next to the door,

One leg jiggling, ready to escape.

Do you know what to do if there’s a shooter?

The agent asked me, asked the class.

Everybody nodded. 

The lectern and desks our only hope

Of keeping that door closed since there is no lock,

And I’m not given the key,

I am forced to tell them.

That time, it was just some backfiring or mechanical sound,

And we got back to what we were supposed to be doing,

Our hearts re-starting,

Still, I see us rocking the lectern from its moorings,

Pulling up the tape covering the wires to the computer,

Pushing and dragging it to the door,

The wires sparking, desks piled around it,

Some of us smashing desks into windows.

In one scenario, we get this done before

The shooter appears at our classroom on the second floor,

In some scenarios, the students jump two stories down,

Breaking bones, cut by glass, but alive,

In another scenario, the shooter enters at our end of the building

And sprints up the stairs, bypassing the first floor;

The veteran, some of his classmates

Sitting near him, try to keep the shooter out

By leaning hard against the door, but can’t,

The agent pulls out his concealed gun and shoots most times.

In many scenarios, the lectern is too heavy,

Too stuck, to move,

The desks too flimsy and small,

Their tabletop hinges squeaking loudly,

Drawing attend, wasting precious time.

In a few scenarios, the shooter is one of my students,

Already in the classroom,

Like the one who lovingly wrote poems about his gun,

The one having a meltdown and yelling at me

During the final,

Another ranting so loudly, another instructor looked in on us,

The one writing about hurting a classmate,

The one who mailed me a threatening letter,

Whoever left a knife at the lectern.

With the sound of hail ringing like deadbolt locks,

I use the knife to cut the wires.

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. In addition to teaching, she has given workshops for gifted children, senior citizens, writers on the US-Mexico border, at-risk youth, and for an afterschool arts program serving a rural Hispanic community. She lives with her husband and two cats.

HOPE TO SEE YOU SOON

by Suzette Bishop

Go ahead and come on down to Alamo, Texas

To admire me, the wall at the border,

Go ahead and come on down to brag

About building me to keep the country safe,

Go ahead and come on down to praise me

And yourself,

How strong we are,

How big and beautiful we are,

How much we cost taxpayers,

How no one can scale us,

How we keep out criminals,

How we cage children but keep them warm

With foil blankets.

Let me help you have a photo op

Before you leave office,

A mic, a platform,

Since you were walled out

After breaking down the doors

And smashing the windows of the Capitol.

As you know, I may be incomplete,

But I’m great,

So great that at night under the stars

This section of me coils

Into a circle,

Tighter and tighter

Around you and your golf cart,

The ocelots staring at you

As they run from one border to the next,

Walling you in,

Keeping the country safe again.

Suzette Bishop teaches at Texas A&M International University in Laredo, Texas. Her books include Horse-Minded, She Took Off Her Wings and Shoes, Hive-Mind, Cold Knife Surgery, and most recently, a chapbook, Jaguar’s Book of the Dead.  Her poems have appeared in many literary magazines and anthologies. Poems about living on the border, animals, and endangered species are highlighted in her most recent poems and books while her favorite way to enjoy the borderlands is by horseback.