Sin Frontera :: Crossroads
After Gloria Anzaldúa’s “To live in the Borderlands means you”
After the double coconut seed; the largest seed in the world
Shape of lodoicea maldivica :: split edges :: not halved :: swollen H
:: weight of :: 25kg :: coco-de-mer :: ecology
of palms suggests :: what is conditional, what structure must arise :: order of an order
of an order :: study the flowering stem :: trace :: beginnings
:: condition of habits :: O what animal :: large enough :: dispersal ::
a carrying :: over land :: sea & air :: minimalize :: plant competition under ::
mother tree :: O mother tree :: what drives evolution :: features of ::
time & change ::we label this gorge :: in growth :: diversification :: cruel
word :: as if language gives permission :: of a wild thing :: to live
within the land :: inert disobey :: born of land :: in shape
only to :: possibility :: offspring of once offspring :: palm leaf
size :: of a compact car :: breaks :: births :: every :: seed :: a hatch
beyond :: one’s own form :: body of :: boundary of :: none ::
none:: our flowering :: none :: an endangered:: we must
un-endanger
Myth Aches
The past remains with us—one annuli of the ram’s horn unthreads, one hollow polar bear hair grows infectious. A statistic: 250 mass shootings in 2022, thus far. A slow soiling exponentially catches fire. Myth as warning. A myth stays with us, despite our forgetting. O, Cihuacōātl, O, Snake Woman, when you ground the bones of earlier ages, when you mixed the ash with Quetzacoatl’s blood, did you believe in humanity as curse not spell? Calcination meant to disassociate into a simpler substance. 63 mass shootings in May 2022 in the US with only 5 days with none. Does any of this look simple? Did you abandon Mixcoatl knowing a species cares more for an AK-15 than a school child? Do you weep only for Mixcoatl, or do you weep for humanity too? Do you shake your skull-face at the myth that more guns stop crime? Abandonment hurts politically—haunts inside the chest. “By 2020 (in the US), about eight in every 100,000 people died of car crashes. About 10 in every 100,000 people died of gun injuries.” You wonder why myth aches. The spears & shields of you. The spears & shields of us. You understand the body as warfare—now too the playground. How you honor those who die giving birth the same as fallen warriors. War is war. A child’s face represents war in america. Parents’ souls become Cihuateteo, faces of skeletal spirits, waiting at the crossroads—waiting for all who give means & method to school shooters, who refuse to lay down an outdated & wounding second amendment for the lives of school children. Our lack propagates the new public health crisis: guns, like Covid, guns. O, Cihuacōātl, what happens to a species when our laws sour? Decisions not to regulate guns wrestles us toward war— our children & consciences on the altar.
Felicia Zamora is the author of six books of poetry including, Quotient (Tinderbox Editions, 2022), I Always Carry My Bones, winner of the 2020 Iowa Poetry Prize (University of Iowa Press, 2021) and the 2022 Ohioana Book Award in Poetry, Body of Render, Benjamin Saltman Award winner (Red Hen Press, 2020), and Of Form & Gather, Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize winner (University of Notre Dame Press). She’s received fellowships and residencies from CantoMundo, Ragdale Foundation, and Tin House. She won the 2022 Loraine Williams Poetry Prize from The Georgia Review, the 2020 C.P. Cavafy Prize from Poetry International,the Wabash Prize for Poetry, the Tomaž Šalamun Prize, and a 2022 Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in Academy of American Poets Poem-A-Day, AGNI, Alaska Quarterly Review, The American Poetry Review, The Best American Poetry 2022, Boston Review,Georgia Review, Guernica, The Missouri Review, Orion, Poetry Magazine, The Nation, West Branch, and others. She is an assistant professor of poetry at the University of Cincinnati and associate poetry editor for the Colorado Review.
Photo by Mauricio Borja