In the following video posted on the PBS website, Saenz talks about the struggle of living on the border. He says that the Border is, “difficult terrain to negotiate because there are no sense of certainties; the fixed ideas of ones identity, ones national boundaries, the way one uses words can come from all sides and come at you like bullets. It’s not a comfortable place to live and if you want to be a writer you don’t want to live in a comfortable place.” Saenz’s creativity flourishes because he embraces the harsh Borderland, choosing to engage the challenges, oppression and difficulty that he see everyday .

*Photo by Dallas Palmer of downtown Juarez and downtown El Paso.

Clouds of fire descend on my city,
dismantle the tension of the darkness,
silence the night-howling.

Let the rain fall, swirling
clouds of glory over our heads,
silky rich in their elegant garments
brushing the faces of your weary children.

Burn away the thoughtless greed.
Scatter the enemy, mice
underfoot a lion.
Trembling vibrations of Zion.
Kingdom vibrations.

Story – Juarez Party Shooting

Staring from behind the bars I saw
withering leaves, corpses on the street. Stepped on by a
sullen and hopeless tribe mechanically existing
through their meaningless days like naked mannequins
in the window of an empty store.

Dead leaves, crushed without a thought
of the life that had once blazed within the veins of the
delicate skeletons, only move now with the
wind and the boots and the shoes; marionette puppets,
lifeless and broken.

Colors forgotten overnight. Summer, a dim memory,
a withering dream, a speck at the bottom of
deep and empty brown eyes. Eyes fixed on the next step.
Eyes that know nothing except survival and the tears of
their cold and hungry children.

Forced to whisper the legends
of summer in the night, mothers somberly sing
fairytales to fatherless children
curled up on their
cardboard beds.

1900 bodies.
1900 mothers
shuffling through their days
while the mutilated flesh of their
murdered sons
hangs like gothic decorations in the dusty
closets of their hearts.

1900 families
left to expend their existence
within the dead space between fall and winter,
the icy cold moments before
the snow cleanses the earth.

Silenced by the burden of being born
into a world governed by masters of death,
their lives flung here and there by the blurred authorities;
the Cartel the President the President the Cartel;
as the media sews the corrupted seeds
of fear and control, the boney
hand of death, leading generations of
boys to the killing fields.

There they tend the bails of powder.
White destruction, the crop that pays – a shimmering mirage,
dancing lies, smiling, death’s skeleton
draped in robes of gold and crowned
with jewels- it’s the only escape
from gray streets.

There they can at least pluck the
leaves and watch them spin and twirl
to the frozen streets below while the tired masses
walk over them, crush them, scatter the dead,
ashes in the wind.

Until the mob that hugs
that rusty fence tears it down, dead branches
at the base of a rotten tree, screaming from the
highest limb the redemption song,
awake the sleeping bride,
fat and clumsy
in her bed.

Drip the blood of your sons into
the river that divides hope from survival, life from existence.
Shake the fence until the Zócalo can stand it no more,
until the dead bones rattle back together, and
life-blood and tears return to the corpse,
the healing from
the Spirit, to the Soul, to the marrow.

Scream until spring,
brimming with green and rain, burns through
your sunless world and your moonless nights.
And the leaves sift back into the soil, turning it black and
rich and fertile. A place of new birth,
rest, feeding the desert, washing away the pain of injustice,
the scattering of souls to end
and the gathering of
family to begin.