40 Feet from Nowhere
What does it mean to go nowhere? Where is “nowhere”? It has been used as a deterrent to us, as children, that we would disappear if …
—Joshua Whitehead, in “On Indigenous Joy and Futurisms: The Affects of our Literatures,” The Capilano Review
What is the relation of the dead to what has not yet happened, to the future? All the future is the construction in which their “imagination” is engaged.
—John Berger, “On the Economy of the Dead”
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“dark figures set against”
We will ferry you
“white of the snowfield”
little bird, beta, chandra
“they walked amid vast”
from the pretend fence
“farm fields & snowdrifts”
where you laid down
“in the black of”
your pulse, nodded quiet
` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` `
` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` `
` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` `
` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` `
its thundering, red traffic
“an almost moonless night”
In our tongues we
“wrapped in a blanket”
will pack more names
“diapers, baby wipes, mittens”
for the moon than
“& two toy cars”
any sky could carry
“one red, one white”
Copyright © 2026 by Divya Victor. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on July 27, 2026, by the Academy of American Poets.
“In 2024, the Patel family was trafficked across the United States–Canada border. They were abandoned in Manitoba and told to make their way to Minnesota. They walked for hours in a blizzard. All four died of exposure [almost] forty feet from the U.S. border. In the two columns—one featuring my words, the other those of the journalist—you might hear a conversation between an elegy and a travelogue. Each column has forty words. Oliver [Baez Bendorf] suggested a quadrat—a small habitat or a filler block used in letterpress printing. The poem uses the diacritic grave as a pun and [as] ambient punctuation. I had flung my mother’s silver anklets onto my passport to create the non-lexical sounds. The reading sequence takes a U-turn, evoking a plow’s furrows, returning the form to the Latin root of verse (vertere: a turn of the plow).”
—Divya Victor
Divya Victor
Divya Victor is a Tamil American poet, essayist, and educator. She is the author of Curb (Nightboat Books, 2021), winner of the 2022 PEN/Open Book Award and the winner of the 2022 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. The collection was also a finalist for the 2022 CLMP Firecracker Award for Poetry.