Since Last We Spoke — Blackbird Archive

← v15n2, Fall 2016

Across the bean field

we have bulls, silent as grass,

silent as your calls. My sheets

don’t smell of kerosene

anymore. Thank you

for the stove, lamps,

re-fri-ge-ra-tor, oh

and the TV. I shoveled

the dirt myself when

we turned our icebox

into pots. I planted

the peace lilies

and fancy-leaf caladiums

you like. Dandelions

rule the cornfields. It’s how

the bulls get fat.

immigration family displacement memory

Javier Zamora

Javier Zamora, an El Salvadoran who immigrated to the US at age nine, is the author of the poetry collection Unaccompanied (forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press, 2017). His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in The American Poetry Review , The Kenyon Review , Poetry , New Republic , and elsewhere. He was the recipient of a 2016 McDowell Colony Fellowship, a 2016 Barnes and Noble Writer for Writers Award, a 2016 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship, a 2015 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, the 2014–15 Olive B. O’Connor Fellowship in Creative Writing at Colgate University, and a 2012 CantoMundo Fellowship. Photo by Monica Sok