As Trump Targets Borders, a Poet Finds Their Language

Poets have primarily based total works on the resilience of lives within the borderlands: Contemplate the theories of U.S. Chicana literature developed in Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera; the English and Spanish within the verse of Eduardo C. Corral; or the translations, mistranslations, misunderstandings, and righteous objections that drive the brand new poems of Natalie Scenters-Zapico. U.S. readers—and U.S. poets—may hardly see the U.S. Southwest, or the Mexican northwest, with out them.

To these names we are able to now add Saretta Morgan. The poet grew up in a navy household and now lives outdoors Atlanta, the place she leads workshops and assists immigrant help teams, however her writing right here considerations, as a substitute, the southwestern U.S. (and northern Mexican) border zone. Her prose poems, transient singing descriptions, momentary recollections and quotations (from pure historical past, from journals, from radical political writers) in her first guide, Alt-Nature, converse insistently and fantastically to lives across the border. Principally they’re the lives of human beings: Mexican, Mexican American, Black, navy, veteran, Indigenous, touring, sedentary. Typically, as a substitute, they’re crops and animals—the saguaro cactus, the cholla, the endangered “masked bobwhite quail”—who flourish in these disputed areas. If solely, the poems indicate, Black and Native and Mexican Individuals may thrive in peace there too.

A United States Border Patrol car close to the U.S.-Mexico border wall in Sunland Park, New Mexico, on Dec. 9, 2021.Patrick T. Fallon/AFP through Getty Photographs

“Between one desert/ and one other,” she writes, “I acknowledge the perimeters, parting and clear.” The skies could appear clear sufficient, however the land just isn’t: It’s crossed by enforcers, roads, partitions, and detritus, “a narrative of chassis. And foraged field springs,” like a sprawling mattress the place nobody can sleep. (How can we sleep, the guide asks, as different human beings die within the desert? How does anybody sleep?)

The poems converse to current disputes over Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Customs and Border Safety, and masked police. A era or two in the past, “the wall was a fence or a joke we used to get house sooner,” as Mexican American households crossed the border simply, unworried. Now the identical wall can kill.

Accomplished in 2024, Morgan’s guide couldn’t reply to the occasions of 2025. As a substitute, she anticipates them, outlining the struggling she has seen—and alleviated, leaving life-saving water for migrants as a member of the sector group No Extra Deaths. She units these episodes tersely amid different violence, and different recoveries, within the historical past of southern Arizona, New Mexico, and the U.S. navy. “Do I remorse my time within the navy, my mother needs to know.” The true Morgan, outdoors the poems, has additionally labored with Veterans for Peace and About Face: Veterans In opposition to the Conflict.

Cholla cacti within the Sonoran Desert close to Ajo, Arizona, on March 28, 2006.David McNew/Getty Photographs

As its topic crosses geographical borders, the guide crosses the borders of style, of memoir and poem, poem and prose, nature writing and journalism. “The genres are all up for aerial eradication,” like weeds or human victims of satellite tv for pc eyes: Morgan would like that the genres keep, in order that she will do her work in between.

She presents her navy household, her grownup life in southern Arizona as a author and hiker and protester and immigration activist, by means of prose that shines and coheres in particular person blocks or sentences however doesn’t—on first studying—maintain collectively as tales. Brief prose blocks, paragraphs, disconnected sentences, and the occasional verse line invite us to place them collectively as a substitute, perceiving incidents, characters, attitudes, and worldviews as extra of the border zones come into focus by means of recollections, tenting journeys, pure histories, bodily proof of energy, compassion, survival, demise, and cruelty. Like this:

Not one of the indicators say thanks on your left arm, or listening to, or lymphatic well being, or land,
I need to thanks for being alive,
And thanks, sadly, when it isn’t what you need to be,
Thanks right down to the strains creasing your deeply infatuated head…

And like this:

The officers watched lengths of our avenue. Our legs
had been barely coated.
Our streets closed and opened to border the method of intimate regard.

Or like this:

Penalties by no means not in season. Or at our fingertips. On faucet. Unoccupied. Romantically unengaged.
Sleepless towards the moist earth. A lush-eyed animal trying ahead with ragged breasts.

In these sentences, strung throughout pages like scraps, human our bodies (our personal and others’), arroyos, hills, remembered conversations, migrants, and concepts about the best way to assist all of them attempt to work themselves a minimum of half-free.

Alt-Nature is kin to one of many biggest prose-poems inbuilt related style, C. D. Wright’s One Large Self (2007). What Wright did for prisons and Louisiana, Morgan does for the border and the Southwest. Wright checked out inside and outside, at incarceration and on the limits—linguistic and emotional—placed on imprisoned folks’s lives. Her work spilled over with numbers, and with initials. Morgan as a substitute has “felt for each boundary, adjoining to which neighboring vertebrates fed themselves.”

Every lizard zipping over an arroyo, every cactus flinging a seed on the wind, testifies to the imposed nature of authorized and social borders, and to the creation of recent sorts of individuals, phrases, and legal guidelines between them.

Morgan’s border throws up magnificence, but in addition injustice, a “damage of stitches.” Her brief paragraphs and disconnected phrases converse to the strains of verse they refuse to turn into, to the strains on maps that nature can’t respect, and to the sentences that they kind as a substitute—grammatical, authorized, or temporal. “Each sentence harbors a singular finish.” “What to do with a Negro within the desert,” an individual who appears misplaced?

What will we make of ourselves, Morgan asks, if we really feel that our locations have at all times are available in between, topic to objections, caught between stations? Learn how to “outrun the authority’s creativeness,” whose literal or figurative floodlights and fences maintain a few of us on the run?

Morgan’s prose poems draw not simply on what she’s seen and heard but in addition on radical social critics: Mary Pat Brady on Mexican and Mexican American little one labor; Ruth Wilson Gilmore on (to make use of phrases she would use) the abolition of the carceral state; the painter, essayist, and poet Etel Adnan. All three deal with what Morgan calls that “line that emerges the place accountability is not going to.” But the poems by no means flip predictable of their language. Nor do their pages—written, she says, on “the tissue between floodplains and the officer’s science”—flip into dry or repetitive explanations; Morgan leaves that kind of work for historians, orators, and analysts.

As a substitute she presents sides, snapshots, parallels: between the quail and the migrant; between her personal peripatetic life and others; between Individuals, Mexicans, members of Native nations, and figures from legend, amongst them “the Daughter Coyote,” “the Demeter Coyote,” “the Persephone Coyote.” Many Native nations’ tales forged Coyote as an immortal trickster, playfully ignoring boundaries, or undermining different actors’ efforts, performing sabotage. “Coyote” additionally means somebody paid to take migrants throughout borders, towards the legislation. Many households (probably Morgan’s personal) straddle the border. In Morgan’s poems, nations’ edges turn into just like the border between life and demise, between the fields of childhood and an maturity within the underworld, that Persephone crosses twice a 12 months, as agreed by her kidnapper and husband, Hades, and her grieving mom, Demeter.

A household talks with family by means of the U.S.-Mexico border fence in Tijuana, Mexico, on July 2, 2016.Guillermo Arias/AFP through Getty Photographs

If different migrants, residents, and enforcers look to Morgan like Demeter, Persephone, and Hades, she herself appears a bit like Odysseus, the intelligent far-traveler beloved by many poets, who wished nothing greater than to search out, and to rule, his own residence. The guide even detours from Tucson, Albuquerque, and Agua Prieta—its standard turf—to Odysseus’s Mediterranean:

Say you’re from Canada, I used to be instructed in Cyprus, the place they took my passport.
However I didn’t assume then, bringing my hand to the mouth of a sailor’s almost-bride,
I embodied the custom, I used to be tiptoeing into the gray-cast sea…

Morgan’s borders are zones of fertility, but in addition scars, as if the continent slashed its personal veins: “The geography, devoted, disfigures every wrist.” Implementing its borders, america engages in acts of epic self-harm, in addition to consigning migrants to dehydration, kidnapping, and demise amid “the barricaded roads” and “the tinted glass of half-drawn home windows.”

Her guide quantities to not an argument supported by verified proof—we must always not look to poets for that—however to a tour, an illustration, a manner (like all poems) to point out what it’s prefer to be her: a girl who is aware of the best way to cross and to dwell in a phenomenal, dry, violent disputed boundary zone that may be a image for thus many different boundary zones—life-death, wet-dry, hopeful-appalled, energized-exhausted, United States-elsewhere. Every time period relies on the opposite. Issues develop in between. Some work out the best way to reside there.