102
and the boy
played
with
the mother’s
fluvial hair
black
her
mosaic-frame
burnt umber
the daughter just
out of
arms reach
gone already
they found the boy in time to save him. many years
from now someone will tell him the awful truth of
all that was lost. the bruises on their backs.
shoulders. waists. how two women. mother. sister.
carried him. gave him their water. on that day he
will learn all there is to know of brown and gold
of
flesh
and
sand
Copyright © 2022 by Joaquín Zihuatanejo. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on November 1, 2022, by the Academy of American Poets.
“This poem is for Juanita and Silas before they were my grandparents. When they were young, scared, and beautiful. For the crosses they bore and the river they crossed. The poems in Occupy Whiteness are meant to capture the beauty and brutality of the immigrant experience. This hybrid erasure was inspired by a true story. When they found the boy in the desert, the temperature was 102 degrees.”
—Joaquín Zihuatanejo
Joaquín Zihuatanejo
Joaquín Zihuatanejo is a Chicano/Latinx poet and the author of Occupy Whiteness, forthcoming in 2023 from Deep Vellum, as well as Arsonist (Anhinga Press, 2018), winner of the Anhinga-Robert Dana Prize for Poetry. The winner of the 2008 Individual World Poetry Slam and the 2009 European World Cup of Poetry Slam, he will serve as the inaugural poet laureate of Dallas from 2022 to 2024.