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SENSE OF PLACE |
by Jennifer Hernandez
I never asked how you felt
as we walked through the cemetery in my parents’ small hometown, a graveyard full of Andersons and Nelsons, Linderholms and Moes. We buried my uncle that morning, the first of his generation to go. He’d driven you across the border from Juarez to El Paso when I went into labor with our first son.
(IM)MIGRATION
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Died in January in Texas, but the ground was frozen solid back home in North Dakota, so they kept him in cold storage until spring thaw. Nothing ironic there. Decades have passed since the summers that I rode my bike from my grandparents’ house to the city park, the swimming pool, the Dairy Bar. Such freedom. My parents had been high school sweethearts, married young. Didn’t work out so well. I found you, my husband, in another country.
