Poetry Magazine

"To Cross the Distance”
Winner of Poetry Magazine’s Editors Prize for Feature Article

We talk of the seeming normalcy of a river in terrain split by the word border. How when one interrogates it, some bodies are free to move in space while darker bodies, even if fleeing for their lives, are held to a limit. We talk of words encoding the bodies they cover: how a difference of language—you, them, nosotros, nuestro—can delineate what a body is allowed to freight from one lyrical line to another, bank to riverbank. And despite everything, the body remains.

How brutal how whitespace can turn the word be from auxiliary verb to a state of being: things that cannot be.

We read together, down the page: There are certain things that cannot be/Undone. Past the margin, the resolution of the sentence feels as unyielding as that which cannot exist—there are things we can do from which we can never come back—and though for most of us English is not our first tongue, we bob and roll in the violence of the language: ‘Undone. Lot’s wife glanced back at Sodom as she was.;"

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Lit Hub

"On Borders, Whitespace and Saying the Unsayable: A poem's virtue is in its lament against powerlessness"

"In Oakhurst, we’re driving fast, laughing and singing when a herd of deer gallop wildly, softly across the road before the truck in front of us hits one. We pull over, rush to his slumped body.

The act of his breathing ripples his fur, his eye large and wet, his horns just nubs. Each breath is too slow, too measurable. There is only a small patch of blood under his left shoulder, but he is dying.

Afraid of his kick, I only touch him after, say sorry as I stroke him. In the smallest space in which death cleaves from life, the sound of any word stings."

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World Literature Today

"What to Read Now"

“Borders, often confused for boundaries, are first imagined by groups who insist power over geographies that surpass such insistence. So limits are invented into rivers and forests, divisions fastened to latitudes. The political borders we talk of are intervened into existence but can widen into very real pained places, can be writ into us like “an imaginary line etched / the length of her,” as Celeste Adame writes,”

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