The Verging Cities & Unaccompanied

“Everywhere is war” (Zamora, 16). Javier sets the stage, war is everywhere, in everything — war permeates. There is no way to understand the depth of a pain such as this unless you’ve lived it. These words are imbued with it, the reality that “The war is or isn’t over, but coffee still brews,” (Zamora, 27). Life becomes like earth, orbited by the violence that is the moon & space. Every now and again space debris comes crashing down and maybe it hits your family’s house, or your neighbors house, and maybe it strikes twice, and maybe you try to find somewhere safer, and maybe you can’t leave your abuelita behind, and maybe you could pray and pray and pray that it won’t land on you today, but you know meteors have no place to go but down.

I could write about my trip to El Salvador. I could talk about going to school with Alfredo Cristiani’s granddaughters. I could tell you how I’ve lived in Arizona my whole entire life, so close to the border, constantly berated with propaganda and hate speech about safe borders. I could write all those things in this post, tell you how I’ve been connected to this issue through proximity to it and none of that would matter because people have “Disappeared” (Zamora, 28), because people are still disappearing.

For me I think these are the two books that most make me want to get off my ass and storm a detention facility. “I am frightened of bodies dried / to bone. These were people, / but I can’t imagine them” (Scenters-Zapico, 36). Inside the American imagination it seems we have lost (or perhaps never had) the ability to “imagine them,” to see what has been appearing on our news reports — and these are not bodies dried to bone in a mass grave, these are breathing, dehydrated people in a mass migration.

These books are both so intentional and stunning at the points where they converge. I found myself sticking most to the moments where death appeared (it’s everywhere throughout these pages, much like the war Zamora speaks of). Death is always present and this is demonstrated in the way that both of these books have some form of obituary/funeral plans. For Zamora it's the poem "Instructions for My Funeral" (17). For Scenters-Zapico it's "After I Read Your Obituary" (10).

Something that struck me that I’d like to close with is the way Scenters-Zapico takes on outsiders, both individuals and institutions. I found that to be some of the most illuminating work on the ways in which people attempt to claim the pain of others while shirking any real responsibility. How they put war, bodies, blood, and loss on display as a means for guilt assuasion. The poems that first come to mind when thinking of this are “Placement” (28-29) and “The Archeologist Came to Hunt Trilobites” (32).

“He hunted trilobites and ferns, but after
that day, he left the desert and wrote:
The human skull was of a girl aged 16-22.

I’d never really seen violence
until that day. Her face was already
bone. Her body, scattered.” (32)

I wonder if change can only come through how others see your dead. I found that reading this poem in particular it was repeated that the archeologist was there looking for trilobites and ferns, but when stumbling upon human remains it was only a note. That repetition, the demonstration of the importance of dead centuries old marine life over that of a young woman reduced to bone. The personification of the sun eating the body of a woman the archeologist decided to leave. No malice demonstrated but how is this not another act of violence upon these murdered women? “Her remains / not worth burial or the glass case of a museum.”

xoxo,
Rai