‘Self-Portrait as Mojave Phone Booth,’ a poem by Sara Borjas

This story is a part of Picture challenge 8, “Abandoned,” a supercharged expertise of changing into and non secular renewal. Benefit from the journey! (Wink, wink.) See the total package deal right here.

Every season, my brother doesn’t name.
I’m central to a sort of aching desert,

my ample arms scribbling his title
in a single, severed wire. My proper eye

— a spiral of frayed copper. My left
— a mirrored image of a person’s silhouette

ambling right into a home at night time.
My brother chooses, again and again,

a nation. My brother leaves me
wandering by way of years, a home

with no father like rain, no mom
current like moonlight. I can’t assist

if now, my mother and father, extra devoted
than warmth to absence, declare he’s honorable

for his service to an entire nation, as if
he had been merely tenting on the backside

of god’s mountain, main different households
to freedom. The issue is, I’m alone.

(Willem Verbeeck / For The Occasions)

I’ve turn out to be the middle of a valley.
My voice is surrounded by weak steel,

glass. I wait, subsequent to a single, affected person
saguaro, underneath revolving solar

for my large brother to return.
At night time, I drink moonlight

— two crystal hearts glinting
in a glass of water. I seize

coyotes’ howls to mark time.
I’ve nobody to open up to

however the snakes. What I imply is,
one thing caring erodes in me

whereas I wait. I want I may consider
that if he calls, somebody will probably be

left to reply the corroded telephone
in my face. I think about my brother,

a rustic’s polished, violent
geometry, may say: I’m sorry —

what I needed was to be valued
for who I used to be taught I used to be:

an All-American Mexican,
valued within the rift, seen

from the balcony of white,
obvious eyes. To which, if I

am nonetheless right here, I’ll reply:
I’m afraid I’m disappearing.

(Willem Verbeeck / For The Occasions)

Sara Borjas is a self-identified Xicanx pocha and a Fresno poet. Her debut assortment, “Coronary heart Like a Window, Mouth Like a Cliff” (Noemi Press, 2019), acquired a 2020 American Guide Award. She was featured as one among Poets & Writers’ 2019 Debut Poets. Her work will be present in Ploughshares, the Rumpus and Poem-a Day by the Academy of American Poets. She believes that each one Black lives matter and can resist white supremacy till Black liberation is realized. She teaches inventive writing at UC Riverside and the UCR Palm Desert Low Residency MFA Program however stays rooted in Fresno.

Willem Verbeeck is a Belgian photographer based mostly in Los Angeles, primarily focusing his work on the on a regular basis landscapes round him.

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