Each week, our readers contribute a new line of verse—or a completed poem—in collaboration with a renowned poet.
When Tucson resident Reed Karaim visited the U.S.-Mexico border for the first time, he was struck by how “inconsequential” the line in the sand seemed, belying the amount of suffering experienced by people on both sides of it. “America’s talk-show political culture has cost us the ability to see anything except in black and white,” he writes in this 2011 essay, “but the reality along the border has long been a messy canvas splashed with color.”