Abstract Associations #010 (Borders)
Borders: What are they? How do they feel? What do they look like?
The Lines of Human Want —
Julia:
A hurried bag,
allowing one toy apiece,
her red eyes belying
her explanation.
Joy:
“Where are you going?”
Indians in an Indian car,
trying to find a Delaware powwow
barely mentioned in Milwaukee.
Halyna:
We crossed the border,
tore flowers in someone else’s fields,
quietly uttering
the words of a first-heard language.
We spent the night
under the bare sky,
our homeland in our dreams.
Chen:
A snake’s tail—
hypnotic, soothing,
slipping in
past the door,
past the window,
past each pore of the soul.
Alberto:
The border is not a scar.
Instead, it is something
we keep picking at,
something that has no name.
Maggie:
Unless
we cut ourselves free.
What kind of saw
could we use for that?
What kind of oars
could deliver one country to another?
Andrei:
This is America.
You get hurt where you are born.
You make poetry out of it,
as far from home as you can get.
You die somewhere in between.
Otilia:
I hold the yellowed paper up,
towards the blued sky.
Its clouds float freely,
not there to define
a line or border
between my words and theirs.
I whisper, then shout
as loud as I can:
Poems are comets
that glow and sublimate
before they tail.
©2025
Produced by (Sylvia 🌞 Kalina & Jozef Cain)
**writer’s notes: I have been reflecting on poets as a unique species, many of whom have been displaced or chosen to immigrate for various reasons. This train of thought led me to Joy Harjo, whom I adore, as well as a few other contemporary poets.
I selected lines from their poems about borders and wove them into a new poem that concludes with my own words. The poets whose work I incorporated: Julia Alvarez, Joy Harjo, Halyna Petrosanyak, Chen Yuhong, Alberto Rios, Maggie Smith, Andrei Codrescu.
borders —
they said i was leaving and a week later we were shadow memories. all my seven years of living i had been in a republic of russia, border death to the west by georgia and chechnya, to the south, azerbijan, to the north the drunk long arm of mother russia and to the east, the caspian sea, nature’s unbureaucratic and unpoliced border.
makhachkala to moscow to london as if it were all one word we were all passengers in the same sentence flowing out of the same book but in different languages, that linguistic border crippling the first few years of school, scorned scum the cruelty of those who didn’t like the funny looking bloke with the molasses accent.
years of public school at a young age opened up the linguistic border. they taught me how to sound like them, to let the others know we stunk of privilege by the way we pronounced the border of prestige.
somewhere, someone decides who is worthy and who is not, to enter or exit a border. power needs shape and border is the first definition, then enforced my mimicry and shame.
borders are for white people and their colonial partitions, feudal states ruled by local dynasts.
in the old days, it was invaded, raided, then settled and they marked their territory by naming their land and issuing privilege for those born within that land.
worthy by birth, unworthy by birth depending on where the birth took place.
my skin and face, too much like mountains and old tribes too close to the fault line, i was too hard to place, a border built around me; not us, not them but some anomoly who had fallen not born within their borders so always suspicious.
ceremony with a cardboard cutout of the queen, congratulations you can exit this border to many other countries now, free of borders. free movement they called it. for us, not them floating families on rafts of desperation.
but soon enough those borders slipped back in, the very masks of evil faces, brexit babies trapped again behind a border.
©2025
Produced by (Sylvia 🌞 Kalina & Jozef Cain)
Intruder Alert —
You can almost taste the dividing edge.
A paradoxical cocktail of limitations.
Separation is unification
Sovereignty is leverage
The core of humanity is a line in the sand.
Political
Physical
. . . and at the crux of it all,
very certainly mental.
Friendships bordering on obsession,
testing the borders of loyalty
How far does a thing go?
Where does it begin?
When does it end?
The frontier is a line of outstretched hands,
extending as if to clasp another in solidarity
. . . but at that last crucial second,
the hands change course
reaching down to retrace the line in the sand
consolidating that which ended
before it could truly begin.
©2025 written and produced by
Open —
We become transparent about all of our hiding spots. Magnifying all the Intersections. Guiding each other through all the vortices into the realm of each matrix of our neocortex. Novus ordo seclorum.
Then, after a great deal of time, once more, we start to get private. Worrying that we will make them bored. Agitated by the soft formlessness trying to press against a Platonic solid. We must hold each other up lest we crumble. We must find each other among the rubble. We must bring each other to the centre.
Them: Those who we love. Who we don't think nothing of. It's always something with them. Because they care. Even more, those who we think think nothing of us are often the ones who care as much. But I digress. And I can digress until the chickens crow. They, these them, we care about. We care for them, even when we don't care for ourselves to care. I care.
Let me rephrase something George Hanson (Easy Rider, 1969) once said: "We're people just like them, from within their own solar system."
We must live among them and pay the price. Though together, we may remember a time without tally sticks. Before we wrote down our experiences and just experienced the word in the world without keeping track with sticks and stones, because the word doesn't need to be written to be spoken.
We have cords that border our mind, and mouth, and limbs, to reach into the world and write without speaking. We can bypass these borders. Yet, we build temples of Babel, trying to achieve what we can in any place in these material worlds. We don't need to contain water in plastic to drink, yet we love convenience, so we do.
These superpowers seem to be wielded by villains when I turn on the programming and listen really closely. A worldwide cold war has waged for nearly a century, and global warming is making itself very obvious if you check the electricity in the rooms. The age of Aquarius was supposed to be run by indigo children, yet here we are on the brink of war too soon.
Bordering lands, surrounded districts, where the nuclear family is torn apart to build nuclear bombs for oligarchs. Let that sink in, like a submersible missile on a mission. The planet they envision has all sorts of prisons. Every colour and shape and size and place, and you could see it if you have eyes, from outer space.
Forgive me while I escape into my place of luxury where my bed is made and my eyes are dotted and tees are crossed to sip tea shipped from across the sea in a china cup made in England on a Salisbury chair made in China. At least if I make some capital, I can transcend these borders. It's the dream they always used to talk about. Just seems like a nightmare most days when you struggle to have security about how your bills will get paid. But I digress.
©2025
Produced by (Sylvia 🌞 Kalina & Jozef Cain)
Thalweg —
1
When I dipped my toe
in the Ohio River at fourteen
all I heard was John Fogerty singing
about boats and plates and labor pains
in an upbeat vein
Not a woman’s pains
(Unless a river boat queen
was a set of stirrups and Mississippi
commerce was mothers in delivery
rooms
Unless she was the nation
perforce, her agony would be
permitted -in song, at least).
I hate to break it to you
those who would define me
as a Jew, I didn’t hear Moshe
talk to any rock; the water
didn’t part; I forgot about
matzos, bitter herbs, and Pharoah
wasn’t upriver in Cairo (Illinois)
either
But I did feel the Thalweg.
It pulled at my toe until my toe
swelled as if bitten by a water
boatman.
Now, in middle age,
I remember the words
Ushavtem mayim b’sason
Not because I believe
or prefer this melody
to the one by Fogerty
but because joyfully
shall I learn
the American lesson
A clearwater revival in Kentucky tones
and the words of two Mathers:
Foam and lather.
2
Go down, Moses
leave a good job in the city.
At least, Ramses allowed us to come
and stay in the work camps of crocodile
Nile -he needed our labor.
We came from Warsaw Łódź Kyiv Khan Younis
also, Glencoe:
When my mother met my father
in St. Louis, two ancient Ashkenazim
asked how this Shiksa should raise
a boy (me) to Bar Mitzvah
Yes, how the hell will she,
will anyone, so far from the Kotel
an exile like every other daughter
of Ruth in the Great American Desert
from Kansas City to Denver
raise her voice to the Voice
Who says draw the long knife
Here I am
she says
But stand back.
3
My parents were helped by rivers
prophet streams jumping banks
knocking on the seder door for
that fourth cup of wine
pointing out buried arks in fields
beneath tabernacles of corn
and anointed wheat beards
But professing faith in reason as well,
call it ‘Lethe awareness’ if you want to
stick it on your bumper.
They were aided by water:
artisanal wells and windmills.
People who could accept ponds,
creeks, and pools as ritual baths,
who would welcome travelers eating fish
never mussels, pronouncing villes as vulls
like Louisvull but oddly Evansville
I wasn’t allowed to say
my mother was a fish
that’s some Faulknerian
nonsense, nor could I indulge
my instinct to declare myself
born again to a republic of herons
and industrious raccoons
the ringtail mutual aid society
(least of all, along any water
body belonging to Beecher Stowe
and the great American morality
play)
I should say:
Just tell them you’d prefer something
other than pork and how you believe
the Shema includes the trinity.
4
Recently, my parents were grilled
by a guard on the leeward side
of an international bridge
who said, why does your son live
windward
He doesn’t need to be there
to do that work, that work
can be done here.
Who does he think he is
drawing a tighter string between
the towns of Ontario and your suburb
below Mason Dixon
(Amherstburg, Dresden, Chatham
those names sound foreign).
I don’t know, is what my parents said
but right now, memory can’t button
its own gown
It takes a lot of gauze
to stanch the bleeding
of this circumcision
when I can’t use words
like Tikkun Olam
A gold dome surrounds the vanishing
line, so bright it banishes stars.
Wells draw syrup; lakes pile up their salt.
I stand beneath a gourd of water and look over
at what I’m told is Cibola; Cibola at last.
The breeze blows like metal over here in Canada.
©2025
Produced by (Sylvia 🌞 Kalina & Jozef Cain)
The Border Closure —
1.
the border closure
blossoms with closed books
and incompatible bills
my mind wanders over the
land crossing checkpoints
pointing me to you
i want to land there
precisely where you
were and will be and are now
in the land i once only
dreamed impossibly
of in deepest mind
i now inhabit
you and your people
somehow now strangely with me
i impossibly with you
here beyond the walls
that separate us
and yet the open
border climbs these walls
of my mind your hands touching
my face my eyes seeing you
our salvation here
between you and me
2.
frontière est fermée
is what the sign says
where i approach from the south
in my dream of the future
now five years after
the global lockdown
only the virus
of stupidity
selfishness greed racism
explains what is going on
at the borderline
between sanity
and insanity
where my dream was born
trying to shake me awake
my pockets full of tariffs
on friendship and love
my hands gesturing
my shoulders shrugging
at the unknowing
of so much we all once knew
in the trilingual sunrise
of the translated
morning being born
3.
no más fronteras
is the cry i hear
from the border cantina
the stages of genocide
on the northern side
of a gravel road
along the border
under surveillance
all along the watchtower
to quote that bob dylan song
there must be some way
to see eye to eye
we are all children
of the great spirit
that transcends every border
in fact we are that spirit
its many faces
there is no reason
not to plainly say
we all must resist
stupidity and evil
here at the border crossing
which is everywhere
and always my friend
©2025
Produced by (Sylvia 🌞 Kalina & Jozef Cain)
In America —
Embarrassed by my own privilege in this country of judgement,
in this country of wealth disparity, in this country of
borders.
I heard on the news that they aim for 3000 people
per day. 3000 souls detained. 3000 dreamers frozen in
ICE.
A mother leaves her life of poverty, her deadbeat husband and
her broken home. But, Guatemala doesn't mix well with
MAGA. They separate her from her 11-year-old for 200
days.
We sit here bathing in inequality. No solutions. No refuge.
Screaming, "They'll steal our jobs!" But, collect
unemployment and vote for people who won't
raise the minimum wage.
There are thousands only looking for a better life.
I wish it was here. I wish it was within
these borders. I wish it was
in America.
I look around and know in my heart it isn't.
I look at you and know in your heart,
you don't want it to be.
©2025
Produced by (Sylvia 🌞 Kalina & Jozef Cain)
The Dark Architecture —
With words we learn to draw
Our first lines, our own design
Even our own language
Leaves our tongues defined
Caged mind.
Hands that bind
A fence blocks beliefs
Trails truths behind
Emotions lie trapped in
This unaware snare—thoughts—can’t prepare
No soft words will mend the tear
Swing an ax, wield the wedge
Another edge
Another pledge
This is a barbed wire hymn
Sealed on freedom's ledge
Land grown grimmer
Slim lines define
Promise grows dimmer
A sign of the times
Signs define
Border on the page
Their aim define
Borders in a new age
Fates combined
Crude lines carve all the
Concrete tears—grinding—grey adheres
From a government
Forcing questions with fears
Whispered sneers.
Silent hears.
Invisible throats choked
Echoing through the years
Break the rules
Become a sinner
Nailed to the cross
Did it make Him a winner?
Rusty notes echo
Become even slimmer
Chain link snake,
The scales forsake—For fuckssake
My patience grows thinner
Borders of control
A never-ending scroll
How much more of our soul
Will they try to bankroll
Border of my patience
Border of the nation
Statistics
Numbers
Detained
Deported
Mother's cry
Beneath a bordered sky,
Her children raise a hand
To wave goodbye.
The whole system —lies.
Capsized.
Look me in the eyes
See it—take its toll.
The wind blows free
On this one earth
Divided decree
Marked birth
What border does it see,
What are these borders worth?
Prejudice bred.
Fearfully fed.
To the walls—we are led
We are led by
Defined—lines.
©2025
Produced by (Sylvia 🌞 Kalina & Jozef Cain)
Guest authors’ publications in order of appearance:
 | A guest post by
|
 | A guest post by
|
 | A guest post by
|
 | A guest post by
|
 | A guest post by
|
ALL these pieces really captures the raw emotion and sense of displacement that comes with borderS. both physical and metaphysical.
Otilia Jones does a stunning job of blending voices from poets of different backgrounds, each grappling with their own experiences of boundaries. Andrei Codrescu’s lines about America, "You get hurt where you are born," feel like a powerful reflection on how identity and pain are intertwined with place. The imagery throughout the poem is vivid, whether it's the "snake's tail" slinking past the door in Chen’s lines or the "yellowed paper" in Otilia’s conclusion, which highlights the struggle between defining oneself and remaining undefined, free from the limits imposed by borders.
Borders, Kolya Reshetov powerfully explores the fluid, often painful nature of borders, revealing how they shape identity and belonging, while exposing the hypocrisy in the notion of "freedom" that only applies selectively.
INTRUDER ALERT The Forgotten Muse This piece captures the tension between connection and division, where every boundary becomes both a barrier and a potential point of unity. The imagery of hands reaching out only to retreat perfectly mirrors the fragility of human relationships and the constant push and pull of boundaries.
OPEN- JOZEF CAIN, The music and writing feel like a raw, unfiltered stream of consciousness that grapples with both the intimate and the global. His language isn’t just poetic, it’s a philosophical unraveling of contradictions, where concepts like borders, identity, power, and human connection clash and intertwine. There's a kind of relentless questioning, both of personal and societal norms, that feels deeply urgent. He shifts between moments of selfawareness and global reflection without losing the reader/listener. The way Cain brings together the global (world wars, cold war, global warming, capitalism) with the personal (his struggle with selfcare, care for others) is striking. It's a piece that challenges the reader to think, not just about the content, but about their own place within the larger framework of society.
Marks’ Thalweg is a haunting meditation on identity, migration, and the interplay of memory and geography. The poem’s shifting rivers, both literal and metaphorical, serve as vessels for cultural dislocation and personal history, weaving a complex tapestry of faith, exile, and belonging. The lines between borders, faiths, and histories blur, leaving the reader suspended in the currents of what it means to belong and to be pulled by something larger than oneself.
What stands out in Potter’s piece is the powerful emotional tug between physical and psychological borders. The sense of yearning and struggle against imposed limits resonates strongly, especially in the second section where the frustration over a border "closed by stupidity, selfishness, greed, racism" is palpable.
Laura Catanzano – In America poem sharply critiques the hypocrisy and deep rooted inequality in America, where the promise of refuge collides with harsh realities. What strikes most is the raw emotional appeal, specifically in the depiction of the immigrant mother separated from her child, emphasizing both personal and systemic injustice. The contrast between idealism and the country’s reality is haunting, particularly in the closing lines, where the speaker’s awareness of the disparity feels almost like a quiet, painful surrender.
Sylvia KalinA – The Dark Architecture KalinA’s poem captures the suffocating nature of borders in a visceral, almost rebellious tone. The juxtaposition of freedom versus control, expressed in phrases like “barbed wire hymn” and “chains forsake” creates an intense image of resistance. This poem isn’t just about borders; it’s about the cost of them. The toll they take. It's a truth we can’t ignore anymore.“Land grown grimmer / Slim lines define / Promise grows dimmer / A sign of the times.” It’s like watching the world shrink, the vision of something better fading into the distance. Borders don’t just divide the earth they divide hope.
Like Kalina’s 12th stanza, “What are these borders worth?” really sticks with you, making you reflect on the true cost of division, both the physical and emotional toll. This was an epic post. It moves like a quiet journey, acknowledging the scars left by borders but still offering a glimpse of freedom through poetry. Thanks for sharing the words and audio, such an art. Such a strong post. Makes me feel like my last poem I wrote in my cohort is silly. Here you all are commenting on huge, real life things, and I’m just over here in my head. Thank you for your voices, talents and guts. WELL DONE Otilia Jones, Kolya Reshetov, The Forgotten Muse, JOZEF CAIN, Jeremy Marks, Jonathan Potter, Laura Catanzano, Sylvia KalinA and THE BROOM'S EDGE TRIBE.
I apologize I can't read all of that. Bad eyes. I took soundings. This is good. A lot of hard work. Smart. Congratulations.