Verging Cities

“We wonder / how two cities are split, how they swell. Watch how they collide” (3).

Verging Cities tells the story of not only the verging cities of Cd. Juárez and El Paso, but of the verging
lives and bodies of author Natalie Scenters-Zapico (or, rather, the speaker she writes), and her partner,
Angel. There is so much imagery throughout the text of bodies as cities, bodies as land to be drawn on
like a map. Scenters-Zapico writes, “We align our backs until we share / the same spire [...] You are the
twin / I swallowed lost within ? a mother’s womb” (53). Her and angel morph into one, drift apart,
intertwine, and are forcibly broken apart many times throughout the text. Their relationship seems fluid
and confusing, changing, just how the sister cities are at once indistinguishable, and also so obviously
divided. Twins with fencing running between them. This work is an awe-inspiring musing on how
borders are created and constructed and the very real effect they have on people. There are so many
examples it is hard to choose:

“He draws lines across her bod in pen” (13)

“She dreamt her body cut / in half- a perfect border” (9).

“The ants form the contours of your face - geography / of a body I cannot begin to measure” (17)

Throughout the text there is imagery of bodies as land, marked up and divided like territories.

I was really shaken up by the vivid and dark images that were conjured up by  Scenters-Zapico’s
words. There was so much surrealist body horror and death. Girls finding a rotting corpse in a cooler,
bleached skulls, blood, ants and insects covering a body. I kept noticing a focus on the mouth, strange
things emerging from within the body.  One poem starts with,“When I speak cactus falls / from my
mouth” (37). I believe there was a poem where the speaker opens her mouth to find a fence at the back
of her throat, but I can’t find it now - if anyone has the page number, please let me know. A passage
that I found both delightful and deeply disturbing;

“While Angel watches Antiques Roadshow / I plant a hazelnut in his ear and watch its brown orb /
take root inside him. I push it into his fertile brain / until leaves poke out of his teeth and
red-bellied / woodpeckers eat his squirming veins” (8)

Even moments that seem tender,” Sunday Mornings” (as the poem is titled) spent watching TV,
are full of these very visceral and gorey images. Squirming veins, a hazelnut invading a soft brain,
leaves growing out of a living mouth, out of a loved one. Maybe I am projecting my own anxieties
onto the text and passages like these are not intended to send shivers down one’s spine, but I found it
happening often. I felt this tension under the surface at all times.

In addition to grappling with a lot of violence, Scenters-Zapico is also grappling with the view that others have of her city/ies. All of the misconceptions and controlling images of El Paso and Ciudad Juárez, boiled into headlines and news coverage and missing posters. In “A Journalist’s Field Notes on The Kentucky Club”, the speaker is a voyeur visiting Juárez, looking for something. He says he is from Minnesota, he asks questions at a bar, he makes notes. He heads back to his hotel room and is “disappointed that nothing more violent has happened” (55). There is an idea of what the city/ies should be, an expectation. In the first poem, “Crossing”, the speaker and Angel kiss in front of a surveillance camera, the man behind them yells, “That’s it? That’s all you have for me, murder capital of the world?” (3). And in “Placement”, a series of nameless artists, poets, filmmakers and writers respond to the violence, the missing women “it’s terrible what’s happening”, one says (28). Scenters-Zapico asks if she’s ever actually been to Juárez, gets no reply. Scenters-Zapico gets to breathe life into her own verging cities. Yes, she does not shy away from violent imagery, from themes of death, loss, bleached bone. But the book is also something of a love letter, both to Angel and to the cities.