 Good evening. Thank you and welcome to Bear Pond Books. I'm thrilled to present tonight's program in defense of butterflies, Poets for Migrant Justice, with poets Nico Amador, Cynthia, Dewey Oka, and Natalie Centers-Zapaco. I'd like to quickly thank Nico for suggesting and helping to organize this event. This was his brainchild and it's really exciting to see it. Before the poetry reading, we will hear from Marita of Migrant Justice, and then we'll hear from the poets who all have beautiful books that we have here at the store. We have Flower Wars by Nico Amador. We have a few books by Cynthia, this one's Salvage, and a brand new book by Natalie Limont. It's out with Copper Canyon Press in May, so we kind of have a sneak peek tonight. They are beautiful books, and I just wanted to talk about them for a second. As I was reading them in preparation for tonight's event, I was excited to see that their poems are insensitive conversation with current issues and also with each other. It's really interesting to see these little threads, but their poems are about women surviving violence, about walls and borders, about identity and the body and wars. In Cynthia's poem, 16, in the book Salvage, she writes, you watch, smokes sorcery, weave a bullet's song from the nest of his lungs. Almost here, a horizon's wine silvered by Soviet fighter bombers, taste venom of the unborn, love the black hole, war carves in a body. Then in Natalie's book, we see in her poem, you are a dark body. She tells us, you are the only dark body of water in a desert littered with bleeding cactus. You are the only dark body of water. Oh, I'm sorry. You travel days drinking only from yourself because you are this land's only dark body. And in Nico's Flower Wars, the poem Elegy by the Side of the Road tells us somewhere small things were being killed quietly. So you can see how these poems are speaking to each other. Each of the books are available here tonight and I suggest supporting the poets and picking up a book or three. I also suggest supporting Migrant Justice by leaving a donation in the jar at the front counter. And I thank those of you who've already done so. And I'd like to thank Orca Media for filming tonight's event and Poem City Montpelier for featuring this and many of our poetry events in the Poem City program. A little about our poets tonight, Nico Amador is a poet, community organizer and educator living in Vermont by way of San Diego and Philadelphia. His poems appear in many journals and his chat book Flower Wars was selected as the winner of the Anzaldua Poetry Prize and was published by Newfound Press in 2017. All right. All right. All right. He is a recent grant recipient from the Vermont Arts Council and alumni of the Lambda Literary Foundation's Writers' Retreat and he works for the ACLU of Vermont. Although I think he also has a new prospect. I've updated that. Cynthia Dewey Oka is the author of Salvage by Northwestern University Press and Nomad of Salt and Hard Water. With community partner Asian Arts Initiative, she created Sanctuary, a migrant poetry workshop for immigrant poets in Philadelphia. She has received scholarships from Vona and the Vermont Studio Center, the Fifth Wednesday Journal Editors Prize in Poetry and the Lee Wei Foundation's Transformation Award. She is originally from Bali, Indonesia. And Natalie Center-Zapaco is from the sister cities of El Paso, Texas, USA and Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua, Mexico. She is the author of The Virgin Cities, winner of the Penn American Joyce Osterwheel Award, the Great Lakes Colleges Association's New Writer Award and the National Association of Chicana and Chicano Studies Book Award. Oh, plus the Utah Book Award. That's a lot for one little book of poems. It's a powerful book though. We do have that here at the front counter. She holds fellowships from the Lannan Foundation and Canto Mundo and is a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellow. She is a professor at Bennington College. Wow. I now turn the stage over to Marita from Migrant Justice. Hi, everybody. Well, first, thank you all three for being here. I feel so honored to have such amazing poets here and this is really good. Thank you so much. My name is Marita Canedo. I'm part of the Migrant Justice team and for the ones that don't know, Migrant Justice is a grassroots organization in Vermont that is bringing justice and dignity for dairy farm workers. Dairy, it's a big industry that sustains the state and unfortunately the workers that are milking the cows are invisible and suffering by different situations with the labor conditions and housing conditions. So we've been working, it's gonna be 10 years this year since we started after a preventable death of a worker, Jose Obed Santis, who died in a preventable accident and since then we've been organizing and we got driver's license in Vermont regardless of your immigration status. We have a fair new partial policy which means police departments cannot collaborate with immigration enforcement and now we have the Milk Withinity Program which brings corporations to be responsible for the workers and their supply chain. So we've been working a lot and with all this we have our community being persecuted by immigration, by law enforcement and it's very important to have time with art. It's really important to hear voices from other people that support this and understand this because it's not easy to go to work every day and know that you're afraid of leaving the farm because you leave where you work and you work where you live. And so thank you everybody for being here. Thank you for this idea Niko and for everybody. I just wanna say that art really fills our souls and we're really glad that you're doing this. So thank you so much and thank you everybody for being here. We have t-shirts. Oh, yes. Please support Migrant Justice by buying t-shirts and leaving donations. We definitely wanna support them even more than we wanna support our work as writers tonight. So country, mine is made of glass and glass I've learned can be placed in the mouth, can move through the body if chewed carefully enough. Smallest repetitions of breaking a thing down to dust. My country, until now I have loved you enough to swallow. So I really thought hard about like, do I start with a heavy poem like that? But I think one of the things I wanted to do tonight was I know so many of you as an organizer for the ACLU and on other projects here and wanted to kind of reintroduce myself to this crowd as a poet. And I think a lot of why I started writing poetry was because of the organizing work and the kind of energy it takes and every organizer I know at some level deals with their own despair and their own sense of futility of we keep doing this work and it just, I think especially right now it just feels like we're gonna keep getting hit over and over again. And so I think everyone kind of has to figure out how do I keep generating energy in the face of that? And I know for me, I've at different times really resisted my own artistic practice or held the position of no, what we need to do is just get on the ground and organize and that's where the bulk of our time needs to go. And so it's always hard for me to make space for my own writing, but there was a period of time when I was living in Philly and I was working on a campaign for transgender rights and dealing with a policy on our public transportation system there. And so we were doing a lot of grassroots organizing around that issue. And for me, it was one of the hardest campaigns that I ever worked on, not because it was big scale, it was a very scrappy campaign, very small in lots of ways, but it put me in touch with my own internalized oppression as a trans people to like try to mobilize other trans people on that issue was really tough. And there was just so much fear about being public at any level. And this was in 2010 when we started the campaign. So it was before there was a lot of media visibility of trans people, you know, a lot of the figures you see right now in the media were not very present. So anyway, there was like a period of time where it was like I was at the height of my anxiety around this campaign and just like really struggling to continue. And a friend of mine had kind of kept pushing like you keep saying you want to write, you keep saying you want to write, like go take a class at the community college in Philly, there's good people there. And so I did. And that was actually the thing that got me through that campaign was having this poetry class. They went to three times a week at nine o'clock in the morning before I started at any of the other organizing work. And so as much as I resist this practice, I also know that it's been really critical. And I think it's been the thing that has allowed me to continue to find a sense of creativity in the work and be able to step back and kind of ask the question like what needs to happen now or what's the solution we haven't thought of yet. So, I'm a believer and a denier at the same time. So thank you all for coming and it's really nice to be in a room with so many familiar faces. Flower Wars. It started with a bang, some say a snap. Then a watery isthmus, a primordial goo, lipping along under a purple steam. Then pods shaped like violins, then fish wishing themselves bigger fins, feet, then pterodactyl, then mammoth, then ice and more ice, the long walk, the centuries and the wilderness, the zigzag wanderer, then a valley, then a lake. Then the herd, the golden grain, a maze of aqueducts singing their blue song. Then a city bigger than Rome, pyramids, a god some people called a hummingbird. A hummingbird cannot be a man, but man can learn to love a hummingbird, to go to war for a hummingbird. This bird was at war with the world and it ate its enemies behind a curtain of roses and the grasshoppers never said a word. Get all plushies. Self-portrait with cropped hair after Frida Kahlo. There's the dream of exposure and then there is the act of it, the ribbon that waits wrapped around a bomb, bound in one moment, scattered to pieces in the next. The first time I raised a pair of scissors to my head, I prayed to the patron saint of sabotage, sharp objects, manic thoughts that come rushing toward you in the night like fraudulent owls. A mirror is not a guide, but a blind face, turning its eyes to the girl darkening inside it. Tell the arsonist that the burning field doesn't first begin with desire. Tell the locus not to love the hum of its own devastation. I cleared the trails of my scalp for the skin that was itching for moonlight and the girl below. I went knifing through. Only then could I relax in my yellow chair and see the pretty beast I am in the wool of a borrowed suit. Tell me you did not like my monkey wrenching, that my hair now metaphor is meaningless. So the other thing I'll just say about these poems is I think a lot of this book was kind of processing a lot of experiences that I had, I would say between like age 18 and 25 or something like that. And I think that was a time when I was really coming to understand myself and build a sense of identity about what it meant to be, to have a mother who's Mexican, to be biracial, to have these other kind of fragments and lineages as part of my racial identity. And then at the same time coming out as queer and coming out as trans. And it's like these things happen all at once, right? And so it's like even when we talk about intersectionality I think sometimes the image is like there's this identity over here and that identity over there and it's like somehow coming together but for me I think coming into it is just like there was so much to try to gather and understand all at once. And I think in writing these poems what I was finding was looking for a way in to talk about all of it at once and to not just say here's my poem about this part of my identity and I think one of the ways that that showed up is a theme around names and just kind of the transience of names and the different reasons why people give up a name or take a name. And so I'm gonna read this suite of poems that I think I'll kind of get at that idea. Elegy by the side of the road. We waited under the curved spine of the highway folding blades of grass in the shadows wondering what we'd call each other tomorrow which names we'd need. Then the foxes came emerging from the gutters to hunt in the green dusk. After a while we couldn't see them. We listened but heard only the low echo of cars. Somewhere small things were being killed quietly. Columbus Day. A single small cloud hangs low over the prairie. The foxes are out again, silver in the grass. On our way into town, you pull over and point to the last place you saw your father, a bus stop. At Guatemalteca, he named you after his favorite American news anchor, his favorite place in Denver, an old movie theater called The Mayan. In this country, every God is a false blonde. Every night and almost night in which nothing comes to rest. I tell you, when she was eight, my great-grandmother was taken from her village and put into a boarding school. In the dark, she'd run down to the river, undress her dolls in the light of the moon and rub clay all over their bodies. Once a fish swam up her leg and became a child. That's the story I've made up. Call me a priest, a medium, a tabloid. Anything certain is suspect. Anything I say might be true. I'm like the Arapaho who told you, for now our strategy is to let them think they are winning. Sometimes I get a ghost in my ear. Out here, the crows shoulder their wings like rifles. The leaves tap out an old code. Elegy for two. You left me a name I could use on men I want to take home at night. A name of raw honey. To say it, to hear another say it, to hear another say it, is to know that every death is also a threshold. That to pass is to gain entry and also to cease to exist. I beg a stranger towards my mouth so that he cannot see my face. I beg but what enters is grief. Tall is a shadow. I use it like I use your name, the myth of you, like a line or a mule, like the raft I've made from this lover's back to cross over. We are citizens of the countries we imagine. We make our homes in the dark. One more. I was going to read tonight and hopefully end on a little bit more of a cheerful note. Eating watermelon with Pablo Neruda. Ask me where I was last night and I'll tell you I was out eating watermelon with Pablo Neruda. Pablo wasn't well, but with each bite he became a little stronger and each word that occurred to him, blossom, whale, icicle, mocked the pain of his, sorry, mocked the pain of his age and the bald temperament of the moon. Nearby, hound wrestled meat from a napkin and stone horses mimicked the black shout of a war that was not quite finished. As we stood there, we spit over 20 seeds in their direction. We spit against empire and presidents and against Donald Duck. We spit against contras and bananas and the days lost to exile. We spit heroically. We spit for vandals and we spit for windows. We spit for our fathers and for the gentle way the fruit vendor listened with his teeth. We spit for the torn edges of stars and the gradual descent of mountains and the weight of mourning and the color red. We spit for love. We made a bet about who could hit a passing bus or the back of an old woman with a face as stony as Machu Picchu. A lone waiter was on a lonely hunt for cigarettes and we asked him if he thought he could go the distance. Flight delivered from the mouth of an idle man is one true measure of happiness. Later, we left marching arm in arm, all three of us. We left the watermelon and the consolation of names at our ankles and as we walked, we avoided the peering eyes of animals and we avoided the lamp light that can sometimes hold one too long in its cheerless glare. Thank you all. Passing to Cynthia. One more time for Nico, largest communist party in the world after the Soviet Union and the Chinese Communist Party. And in this country, as a result of U.S. foreign policy, anywhere between 500,000 to 3 million suspected communists were massacred. As a massacre, most of us have never heard about and still can't be talked about in my country. Meditation on the worth of anything. A tall man wipes ashes from his lips. I'll pay you, he says, if you're worthy. From the lamp of his skull, a steeple rises. Roaches seek warmth in the dead bells while cherry blossoms burst their green corsets. My mother at the end of a 12 hour shift at the factory will heat rice and vegetable soup, cooked last weekend and kept frozen to last her six working days to eat while watching reruns of the good wife. She does not understand what Juliana Margulis is saying. Sometimes she weeps because memory is long and bendy, a red line that curves around the globe instead of cutting through the center. It begins on a piece of rock represented on the globe by a bump under the fingertip, a body at the bottom of a well, which is a good place if someone's kid could lower a piece of mackerel down to you in a pail twice a day, cleaned of its bones. Strange how expensive rice was then with so many bodies in the river, puddles trailing their red ribbons. When I told my mother I was going to start organizing workers, she slapped me with the same hand that used to soothe the long bumpy scar on my father's chest. I have to make time to cry and eat, fuck that kamikaze shit. It was not just from grief that shocks of hair fell from my head to the kitchen floor. I wore four sizes too big but ironed jeans for the better part of high school and threatened kids by thumbing a knife across the skin of an orange because my parents believed even an ordinary man of no particular feat or achievement could be brought back to life when God wanted to prove a point. In other words, there could be a universal language in whose syntax fire is not a country. Sometimes it's like I'm almost there. Some mornings, smoking, I lock eyes with the squirrel perched, perfectly still on the lip of the garbage bin. I picture its soft little lungs flaring like a dahlia. It's true. My mother refused to howl like the dog they called her. My father once glowed. Inside there is a desk and on it a flower head made of paper. It says, mom. It has six petals around it that unfold. A list of possible destinies. You take great care of me. You cook for everyone. You hear what I have to say. You always cheer me up. You love me. You are the best. And a wire stem wrapped around the frame of a faded photograph. A man with thinning hair and jutting cheekbones to his arm around a girl, six or seven, in a traditional yellow cabaia. The drawn curtains behind them admit no stones. Her eyes squint. She is smiling, mouth small, red, like a liar's word. So here, I feel really, really honored to be here. And especially to be here in support of Migrant Justice, an organization. I have just like a huge amount of love and respect for. In my daytime, actually, I work for a national alliance of which Migrant Justice is a part. It's called Grassroots Global Justice. And one of the reasons that I identify with this alliance as my political home is because it's one of the few organizations in the United States with a really internationalist perspective. Because when we talk about Migrant Justice and what that means, it's not just a domestic issue. It is very much tied up with what the US is doing abroad and how so many people continue to pay the price for like us feeling safe here, relatively. So one of the things, so I wrote Salvage in the first few years after migrating to the United States. My family, I grew up in Bali, Indonesia, but we moved to Vancouver, British Columbia in Canada, which is also entirely unceded, cosilish territory. And that's like a whole displacement in its own right, like inside, you know, like how are we thinking about migration and relationship to like original peoples of the land that remains occupied. And it was like a big shift for me to move to the US and suddenly, you know, like I pay taxes here now and I am like complicit in the like US war machine in a different way, if that makes sense. So for the first little while, like when I first moved here, and this is a crisis that is still happening. We don't talk about very much, although we should. This was like at the peak of the drone wars. And, you know, Lazarus is a figure that like recurs in my poems sometimes because, you know, he's like the figure of resurrection of like return, like the idea of return. And like, when is it possible? For whom is it possible? And like, when is it not? So there's just a short sonnet. Lazarus reconsiders his awakening. What of boulders the Lord does not command to move aside? The blood pollen on azure spring and bones marks a splendor, the hooves of cattle from a drone's teeth, black spittle of mountains, the fugitive proof. How our Lord, enthralled by your firework, aloof, stoopes in the mud like a house of overdue loans, his love syringe, his floorboard smooth, a bowl of moans, the hushed bell hushing swallows in the body's groove. What of the animal, ritual and metaphor of need you become beheld by flame? Filled at last with flutes, with prophecy, the holy brain crawls its way up the leaves, feeling out the hunda of titanium-studded night, oh, roses' hilt, resurrection, which tomb beyond the flag's refrain. I lived in Vancouver. I lived in a neighborhood called the Downtown East Side. I don't know if any of you have heard of it. The Downtown East Side was for a long time the lowest income zip code in Canada. And we were, when I lived there, I mean we were fighting gentrification, like on a serious, I mean it was just like, it was happening so fast because of the 2010 Winter Olympics being held in Vancouver. And I, and you know, I mean I think about that a lot just in terms of the ways in which gatherings happen because the Olympics is like this moment of the whole world comes together in competitive games that doesn't include bombing each other. And sort of like, and just like the way that our economy and the way that we value things happens all over people. And one of, I think, the things that, as I've been a part of the migrant justice movement in Philadelphia that we've been really thinking about is how are we making those connections between displacement between countries and then like displacements at the local level, right? And like how are we talking about solidarities across like these different identities and bodies and communities that continually like have lesser and lesser choice about where to be and like how to survive. So I have like this old poem to the down tiny side. Jesus is tested in the down tiny side. Nowhere is the devil to be found. Only windows of Superman dust, brick facades like the thighs of old men. Cardboard condos swaying on the banks of rush hour traffic. This is no desert though on bad days the matchstick light fills the body with sand. No miracle is required. Only snuff out the night's fire with gloved hands. The visceral snap of an umbrella like palm over mouth. Under dry clean coats there are months of rain. Calendars chalked on the macadam, bones crumpled like paper. The women work the darkness like breaking a horse. Reciting the names of the missing like medicine. Now the leaves cease to imitate fever and socks are difficult to come by. Now the police grow wings over their blue shells. Tut, tut, tut, they strut, hip and mammal royalty. I'm not depressed. The coffee is decent at Maine and Columbia. The road back to innocence is needle thin. And at any hour there are carts unzipping sidewalks loaded with the cast-offs a life is trying to salvage. See the bright scarves of flesh. Slender fingers clipping a morning's first cigarette after a thunderstorm the sky is red as nostalgia. I stand beneath it naked. Naked as the way humans love on this roach-infested pedestrian earth. Sometimes I imagine it's my face on the semen, blood-stained bills that pass hand to hand like the poor man's Olympic torch. But it rains too often to keep up the mirage and so even deities learn. This is pain. This is power. This is the hand of a child I am holding who suddenly disappears. Pulsus, I'm gonna switch hands actually. Pulsus, begin the body's wick. The kidney root of flame. Muscular palimpsest. My father slips a memory of water. Hold vigil around the bed become garden, float and bless life's effort to lift the dark helmet. He throbbed like a mountain range. Cold is a field of tulips somewhere in northern Washington. The sky empties of conviction. Each downward stroke, a bony green, frost simultaneous char. There are waves we cannot resist. Waves like God's fingernails dragged across a veil. Field of insects sheen of eyes, field of frozen lightning. O petal, please defend the yellow, the red, the purple, the blue. See the sun he was. The lineage of winds that made refugee of his heart. Hands folded now. Immune to shadows in the corners of his mind only velvet. Tulips, thicken, calcify, knuckles split at the seams, walls of the damage taken apart. A smile is a perfectly tied shoelace, a black windbreaker with blue fleece collar the body pushes out. His salt in the bowl of my neck. Newly formed plateau on earth from one absence to another. What is weight? What is human? But the blinking of tulips around a small downed moon. Both the skin of the egg and the hair caught in a bun are efforts to bind memory. Father, my head, we are twin fruits snarled into one. The neck pulses beat in battle. Mother, a mesh of knights is thrown over your cheeks a country which will not leave my body. We are always approaching the edge of a foreign land. We are no less afraid of the sweetness left for bees to redeem. Stomach, knuckles, the dust gathering force our love this wind bowed grass. I'm gonna read one more poem and actually it's in, I think I printed it. Winning. After Trump was elected, I took a year away from the organization that I'm from my political home to do migrant justice organizing in Philadelphia because there's a... Philadelphia houses the largest concentrated Indonesian diaspora and a very large number of our community is undocumented. Because for many, many years because of the close relationship between the US and Indonesia, it was really hard for people to apply for asylum successfully because that would mean that the US would have to admit that it was in partnership with a government that was committing egregious human rights abuses. So there was, and it's like, it's a community that has been, that is really, really underserved. Like interpreters don't exist for the community to like support, to facilitate like people being able to like file complaints at work or get help like, what do we do? Like if ICE comes. And so I stepped out and did that work because I still speak the language. And when in the fall of 2017, the Philadelphia ICE office was doing, they were just getting really, really aggressive. They were doing massive roundups of people like at work, on the streets, at homes. And we, there was like, I don't know if you guys remember but it was leaked that they were gonna do this. We didn't have the exact date but we had like a timeframe. So I was like running around like a crazy person just trying to hold as many know your rights trainings in the community as quickly as I could. And one of the things that was really hard about that moment was all the things that I couldn't say to like folks because we have to hold ourselves in a particular way as organizers. And I think that that's really important but also like that's where literature has been so important to me. It's like, I don't wanna lie here. However, like politically important it might be at the moment, if that makes sense. So this poem is called Redacted from a Know Your Rights Training Agenda. Hi. Redacted from a Know Your Rights Training Agenda that a pot holds street in the middling borough of Collingswood, New Jersey, that's where I live. Bears the name Atlantic after an all consuming body of water. That all consuming is atlas's curse to bear the heavens on his shoulders. That after the fall of the gods, half of the heavens is darkness. That inside the car speeding down the street, I believe I am safe from being halfed. That I am not a white box, but a body of water. That white is a pattern of boys who expect to live long enough to become men. That some of these boys are whistling by on their bikes and behind them clear as a dream, welcome candlelight. Clear as a dream, welcome candles in the windows framed by blooms of vervain. That welcome means I thought I was not afraid of the dark. Since the jade scrubs of the cancer ward. Since the fluorescent grid of the factory and the vista of small bones in my father's collar while I was interpreting for the 20-something-year-old white citizen, tell your dad he can quit or I can fire him. Grief had already burst its cocoon. It ate him like an army of moths from the inside. That brown men and women kept stitching jackets under the heavens of the machines, welcome. That a moth is trapped in the car with me, it will die, but I do not want to practice fluorescence alone. Like a first language, bleeding hearts call speaking truth to power. I don't know how they don't know that power doesn't care. That watching fires go out will become a pattern. That fire is everywhere and therefore cheap. That the hole in my foundation is all consuming and at its bottom, a frangipani tree opens its yellow hands. That police ice is printed in yellow or white on the jacket of the night. That the night walks freely among the ranks of the sun. That a body of water parted once like a red skirt then sealed over the armored horses of Egypt. That Whitney Houston is a bone blasting out the car windows. That's a night, the night after. The night after that for as long as the distance between God and a pothole, a moth's flight will spell, they are coming for you. Thank you. Cynthia, that was amazing. That was so beautiful. Thank you, Nico, for organizing this and inviting me. I feel so lucky to be a part of this. Please, I promise not to read for forever. I'm sure you're kind of like getting a little antsy at this point in the night. But I just, this is an amazing crowd. So thank you so much, all of you for being here. And please, more than anything, support Migrant Justice. Donate, you guys have shirts, is that right? But as for sale, please buy shirts. I will buy some one. So let's make sure that we support them. So I'm originally from the sister cities of El Paso, Texas in Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua, Mexico. And I always really make a point of saying that I'm from both spaces as a fronteriza because it used to be one city, El Paso del Norte. And when it was decided that the river would mark the border in Texas, this was one of the cities that was sort of cut in half, kind of. And so it's really important to me to say that. The other thing is that I'm going to read some poems first from the Virgin Cities, which was my first book. And then I'll read a couple from Lima Limón, my new book. But for this particular event, I thought I'd read a poem called Broken Initials. Much of the first book tracks my husband and I's process of applying for a green card. So my husband came to this country undocumented when he was nine years old with his family. And we're a little bit older than the DACA generation. And so really there was no, he's from Mexico, Chihuahua, Mexico. And so there was really no path at that time for papers for him at all. So we got married and we applied for a green card, which was like wild, that we could do that all of a sudden, and felt wildly irresponsible to just strange that after all that time, they were just like, yeah, OK, sure. And it was very complicated, kind of his case. But we didn't have a lot of money. We were in graduate school, or I was in graduate school at the time. And we were living in Albuquerque, New Mexico. And we found out about this woman, if you're familiar with Albuquerque in the South Valley, named Bertha, who nobody really knew what Bertha's credentials were, but she would help you put your documents together. And she had a great success rate at helping you do this. And the last line of this poem was what was on her business card. Broken initials. J-A-M, and D-T, and M-B, and U-T-B, and NS-Z, and your name. Jose Angel Maldonado. We leak from the ear, the nose, the broken tooth. We leak letters, small check mark, no tuberculosis. I found your 10-year-old face under the laminate of the border crosser, Visa. Unstamped passport, itin on a loose sheet of paper, a signature that isn't yours and isn't your mother's, a signature of a man, the ink a black hole that swallows each memory of light. Every book you've read, gone, missing, gone. The dog tooth on each J, gone. Wife's name, Natalie Center Sapico de Maldonado, to show commitment. Cashier's check, $1,500 paid to Homeland Security. Check, $600 paid to photocopy machine typewriter, and Bertha, who stamped each page with an initial. J-A-M, and B-T, and NS-Z, Bertha's immigration. We are not a legal service. If you're familiar with El Paso, Texas, when I was growing up, there wasn't a wall yet, the wall, the current iteration of the wall in Juarez El Paso, that is always being pointed out as some sort of, well, it works in Juarez El Paso, right? This wall we built, went up when I was in college. But before that, it was really common on the west side of El Paso, where I grew up, for people who had crossed to the desert to find themselves the first place where they would cross and realize that they were in the United States, that visibly looked like the United States after crossing the desert, they would end up in this mall area with a target, any mall area. And so it was very common growing up to see really horrible conditions of people coming across and ending up in this parking lot. And it was always very striking to me, and there's also a lot of really violent stories in those parking lots. Woman found near Sunland Park Mall, El Paso, Texas. When he finds the woman the target customers have been reporting, she is open-mouthed and whispers, ah-wah. He thinks how common to find a woman who crossed the desert without enough water. He gets close to her face. Her body has betrayed her. Water is heavier the drier the landscape. He puts his foot on her neck and watches how slowly her face turns red with blood. When the other border agents ask what state he found this woman in, he has a story that involves water, how some can buy it at target, and how others don't know how to call it by its proper name. I'll read one more from the Virgin Cities. So one of the most striking things for me when this current iteration to the border wall went up in El Paso Juarez when I was in college is that aside from kind of these rust-colored rods that you see all over the news, there's also these giant poles with numbers at the top so that Border Patrol can call out what sections they're in. And it was always very striking to me because suddenly, aside from visibly being able to see the city sort of sliced in half, you also all of a sudden had the cities also designated areas by the state. So instead of having street names, all of a sudden, they were just these state numbers. So the city is a body swallowed. We align our backs until we share the same spine. Your vertebra are the numbered metal poles that mark this part of the border, 357, 358, 359. You are the twin I swallowed lost within a mother's womb. I thought you died, but look how deep you fell inside me. A ball of teeth and hair nestled in my throat. When I speak, no one remembers how shallow our river can be. An arm cut from the body of its meaning. En el año de los setas, en mi boca una flor. En el año de los setas, en mi boca una flor. En el año de los setas, en mi boca una flor. In the age of los setas, St. Michael hangs demons with velvet thread and opens a torrent of tissue flames in a scene created in a box of Altoids. St. Michael bites a cracked enamel heart, too big for his tiny plastic cleft to carry. I am in mourning in the bloodiest year of Mexican history. I stare at St. Michael, my little automaton, and feed myself weak old bread that crumbles my teeth to dirt. I save my oral rubble to sell as earth for the burial of men, men who only value a woman for her extra rib, that holy thing that breaks and heals without a cast, men who want to fill my body with a clutter of spiders, eager to eat the flies that swarm my uterine lining. In the age of los setas, I only take what I can carry, a relic carry of cloths, all the children I fail to bear because I've been hit by men who in their thirst for me strangled a flash flood into our kitchen. Don't tell me I deserve better in the age of los setas. I am blessed with a man as beautiful as St. Michael, whose shirts I pierced tug an embroider with roses made from a demon's noosed velvet thread. I'm going to read two more. So one of the things that this book Lima Limón really focuses on is I was really interested in giving voice to or thinking about a lot of my experiences growing up in El Paso Juarez as a young woman. I grew up also. I was there at the time of kind of the height of the drug wars in Juarez, which was wildly different than my experiences in Juarez growing up. And so I mean Juarez used to be a place where I mean I used to go all the time. I grew up going. And so all of a sudden to be surrounded by that amount of violence was really hard and to really feel like I couldn't enter that space. One of the things that people don't talk a lot about with regards to the current immigration crisis in this country are also the number of women who are in abusive relationships or marriages and will not call police in order to get help because they're worried oftentimes, not just to get themselves detained, which is very real, but also to be taken from their children. My macho takes care of me good because he's a citizen of the United States. I got a stove this big, a referee this full, a mirror just to see my pretty face. He says my name's on this license. I drive La Troca so you don't have to, Mija. I am a citizen of the United States. Because he's a citizen, we are muy lejos de Dios, but we love those United States. I don't wash laundry with kicks of jabonzote because my macho takes care of me good. I bring my macho Nescafe, American made, because he's a citizen of the United States. I ask for Feria to go to a doctor, and he says ingrata, you're not sick. I clean chiles, then rub my eyes. Siempre lloralloras chiona, and he's right, ayoro, yoro, sin saber por qué. I bring my macho smoke in a glass and smooth every shirt with my new electric iron. He says no hay nadie en casa, why wear clothes at all? So I don't. I fry chicharrones, his, his across my bare skin, bang, bang my macho's fists on the table. He wants más y más in his United States. I give him all of me served on a platter from back home, plump, cracked, and ready made. Crunch, crunch, it's my macho. You married him, says my mother, and he takes care of you good in his United States. I'll read one more. You are a dark body of water with a bed of rock, barely visible from your surface. You are the only dark body of water in a desert littered with bleeding cactus. At your collar bones, you carry a gulch held up by a thread of hair. You travel days drinking only from yourself because you are this land's only dark body of water. At the crease of horizon, you find a woman in bed, her chest wet with saliva. You kick her off the bed and take her place among its sheets. A man lies down in bed next to you. He swallows your dark body of water and gives you a woman's body, a body you've never known. As a woman, you receive sores from him and through the sores you breathe and despite the sores, you give birth to a child stillborn for lack of water. You kick the child off the bed, but it returns in the arms of the woman whose bed you stole. You cry to be made again into a dark body of water. The man kicks you off the bed, covers you with dirt and turns you desert. You cry for a bed he will never let you sleep in again. You cry for your body's bed of rock turned desert for lack of water. Thank you. Thank you, that was really beautiful. We will take a few questions. Do you mind answering if anybody has any questions? Now would be a good time. Or we can all just take a deep breath. We'll also do book signings. So if you'd like to speak with the poets and have your book signed, we can do that and check out the Migrant Justice Donation Jar and the T-shirts and all the materials as well. Thank you, if no questions. Another round for our poets.