Dangerous Crossing

A WRITER'S WIT
My art teacher in junior high was a very out gay man and a mentor to me. He would tell us about Greenwich Village and show us The Village Voice and describe his life, but it was all sort of subversive and below the radar.
​Gus van Sant
Born July 24, 1952

G. van Sant

New Yorker Fiction 2017

​***—Excellent
**   —Above Average 
*      —Average ​​

Jon Lowenstein

***July 24, 2017, Cristina Henriquez, “Everything Is Far from Here”: A woman crossing over the border from Mexico into Texas is separated from her five-year-old son by the coyotes responsible. ¶ Fiction or not, this account is the most realistic, it would seem, that I have ever read: mothers waiting for children in the American detention center and not always being reunited, sickening food and water, other disenfranchised who are even more callous than the attendants, more abuse: “To throw up is to disobey orders” (54). Hope, like new skin, regenerates itself each day, yet it can be dashed abruptly:

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“And then one day there are leaves on the trees, and wild magnolia blossoms on the branches, bobbing gently in the breeze. She will stay in this place, she tells herself, until he comes. Through the window in the dayroom, she watches the white petals tremble, and, in a gust, a single blossom is torn off a branch. The petals blow apart, swirling, and drift to the ground” (55)

​Every American should have to spend a day in the protagonist’s shoes if for no other reason than to see what some must undergo to seek the privileges others more than likely take for granted.

​“It’s easy to let that happen, so much easier to give in, to be who they want you to be: a thing that flares apart in the tumult, a thing that surrenders to the wind” (55).

​A sad truth. The author’s latest novel, The Book of the Unknown Americans, came out in 2014.
Jon Lowenstein, photographer.

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