By Julie L. Moore
Along the Rio Grande, in Ciudad Juárez, amid the high Chihuahuan desert, when bitter winter arrives, asylum seekers like a Zacatecas grandfather make coffee in a pot from water frozen overnight then mix chili with eggs over the open flame made with twigs gathered within reach of the bridge that eludes them, fire a girl warms herself by, knit hat upon her head, fleece enveloping her like Gideon’s prayer pleading for a sign. Here in the Paso del Norte, nestled in a plastic chair, another girl, just one year old, is wrapped in sweaters like a gift some Americans refuse. Look, for instance, at Nicole Marie Poole Franklin, who intentionally aimed her SUV first at an African-American boy ambling around his apartment complex, then at 14 year-old Natalia Miranda as she walked to a basketball game, excited to see her friends, cheer on her team. I mean, on the sidewalks, in Clive, Iowa. Just before Christmas. Accelerating to make contact. Ice, indeed, suffices when you are tender and mild when words subsist as sticks, as the thick skin of stone. Where even air in a nation’s atmosphere hits you hard, then runs from the reality of its strike.
A Best of the Net and six-time Pushcart Prize nominee, Julie L. Moore is the author of four poetry collections, including, most recently, Full Worm Moon, which won a 2018 Woodrow Hall Top Shelf Award and received honorable mention for the Conference on Christianity and Literature’s 2018 Book of the Year Award. Her poetry has appeared previously in Saint Katherine Review as well as in African American Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Image, New Ohio Review, Poetry Daily, Prairie Schooner, The Southern Review, and Verse Daily. She is the Writing Center Director at Taylor University, where she is also the poetry editor for Relief Journal. Learn more about her work at julielmoore.com.
Comentarios