As the Undocupoets approach our ten-year anniversary, we made a few excellent decisions. The first was that Marcelo, Janine, and I sprung into the action of organizing an anthology that would house the work of our community, undocumented poets in America. We initially titled it Undocupoetics: An Introduction. Undocupoetics because we believe that undocumented writers mutually share similar aesthetic concerns and inclinations. Introduction because we believe this is the beginning of many iterations of the undocupoetic. HarperCollins renamed our anthology Here to Stay: Poetry and Prose from the Undocumented Diaspora to better describe the contents, and it remains very much a conversation among poets about why and how we write when undocumented.
And therefore we made our second and third excellent decisions: In 2021, we chose Tobi Kassim and Oswaldo Vargas to be recipients of our Undocupoets Fellowship. In 2022, we chose José Felipe Ozuna, Beatriz Yanes Martinez, and Claudia Rojas. (In 2023, we chose three more poets, but for now we are celebrating these five.) This fellowship, which we distribute every year, provides a grant of $500 for the poet to spend however they see fit, as would supplement the writing life. Or the non-writing life, if there is such a thing. We see, in the poems and the prose statements each poet wrote for the Here to Stay, that there is little separation. Granted by the U.S. government, our identity as undocumented has a special way of clinging to our pens.
Thanks to cooperation with The Rumpus, we are pleased to present to you, our readers, the five poems by our 2021 and 2022 Fellows. Five poets who reside, with varying ease, in the construction of their identities. In these poems, we see some common themes of undocumented immigration: problems of delay, of poor timing; of longing for family. We see intimacy, an uneasy position within the natural world, one that requires mediation. And we see five emerging poets ready to reshape their futures according to their poetry.
We invite you into this special folio—and through.
—Esther Lin, Janine Joseph, and Marcelo Hernandez Castillo
UNDOCUPOETS co-organizers
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Disclosures
Tobi Kassim
About my life I am asked
Do you get a chance to go back
Everyone wants to know if I can
go back home sometimes–
I say shapes of grief in recess,
shape of grief to come.
In an essay about lightning
I read “only that which returns
discloses itself.” God is rule
bound in the lightning
to flash once in the edge
of the field while we sift through
engine sounds for its echoes—
motorcycle on the back
fire, rain on fat leaves. I’m sure
I’ve seen it before: enough
light to catch a familial
instant and remember
each figure when dark
re-settles. I learn to love
an afterimage; a glow
deep from my skin
where every year layers more
rich silt over me. Frequencies
are predictive for sensitive
instruments. Or: seeds shiver
under snow. Shorter
bandwidths fluctuate
peripherally. Our dictator
rose to power a month
after I was born. Took Ken
Saro-Wiwa’s last breath.
Lord take my soul
but the struggle continues. Five
years later dancing returned
when the dictator died, my mom
bore a daughter and named
her Esther: hideaway. Absences
where the lightning struck
no light can fill. From another
root Esther means star
means delayed
means marked out. Light
still arriving. Often
I believe in the origin
an aftershock implies but
faith’s a dull instrument.
Life sprouts quiet flash
bulbs. Shuttles in the dirt
between one heart
beat and the answer’s
deferred thud.
Tobi Kassim was born in Ibadan, Nigeria, and has lived in the United States since 2003. His poems have been published or are forthcoming in the Volta, the Brooklyn Review, Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, the Kenyon Review, Zocalo Public Square, Four Way Review, and elsewhere. His chapbook, Dear Sly Stone, was published by Spiral Editions. He was a 2021 Undocupoets fellow, received a Katharine Bakeless Nason Scholarship from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and works in New Haven’s Public Library.
All That Earth
Oswaldo Vargas
If the head of an elk
asks me how my day’s been,
I’ve gone too far—so has
my straight friend, as straight as
the timeline for which I’ve known him,
until he waded in this water
and called it
warm—he said
we had soles to wear out,
together on some slope—first one down
has to drag our game
by its antlers back to camp—it’s there
where
one night I bet on flipping on
the gas lamp
with one glance,
the kind I make
when
I wake
up to mud, caked
between my fingers.
Oswaldo Vargas is a former farmworker and a 2021 Undocupoets Fellowship recipient. His work has been anthologized in Nepantla: An Anthology of Queer Poets of Color and can be found in publications like Huizache and Narrative Magazine. He lives and dreams in Sacramento, California.
Border-Crossing on a Rothko Painting
Untitled, 1986
José Felipe Ozuna
The desert burned even the spit in my mouth.
Every bird the same shade of ochre.
We watched them melt into a gold sky
Filled with just the bare wisps of white
You would not call clouds in any other place.
Merely trickles, edges of something.
I bet we look so small God mistakes us
For the smudges he left behind.
The border: a white line splitting
Animal from citizen, spic from civilian.
I had to climb it to reach America.
I’m waiting for someone to tell me what I am.
They said they will not hear my case
Until I wash the paint from my hands.
José Felipe Ozuna was born in Guerrero, Mexico, and currently lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He is an Undocupoets fellow and a 2023–24 Mentor Series Fellow. His poems are published or forthcoming in Poetry Online, HAD, hex, and elsewhere. You can find him at linktr.ee/josewrites.
Bitter Ginger
For Virginia Jovel
Beatriz Yanes Martinez
I can’t remember if the grove behind your house was a memory I conceived of,
or the retelling of a memory I heard from your daughter
I want to make a list of all the memories I have of you
they appear in fragments, diluted by the desert
the pink bows of your apron,
the garden of roses, petunias and bitter gingers you tended to each morning,
your calloused hands that used to braid my hair
the prayers you taught me in rote
the silent reprimands when I forgot my manners
I remember cradling your head as I plucked away the gray hairs
Or perhaps, that’s another of my mom’s memory I’ve made my own
the melancholy of the house you embodied when mom left
the bitterness of your voice when you were angry
the meticulous care when you ironed out my uniform
the proud stance of your walk
the conviction of your faith
the separation grief I’ve held for the past seventeen years
tastes like the bitter ginger that you grew in the back of your garden,
it tickles the sides of my gums,
leaving its aftertaste stagnant on the roof of my mouth
Beatriz Yanes Martinez is a queer Salvadoran poet and curator raised on Long Island, New York, and currently based in Vermont. Their poetry is informed by bodies of water, oral traditions from their grandparents, speculative futurisms, and a passion for art and archives. Her work has been published in Bodega Magazine, Michigan Quarterly Review, Acentos Review, and La Horchata Zine, and she has received fellowships from the Brooklyn Poets, Bread Loaf Environmental Writers, and Community of Writers. Beatriz is a Mutual Learning Curatorial Fellow at the Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, and will be starting a PhD in American Studies at NYU in the fall.
Citygazing
Claudia Rojas
Every morning, I wake, I begin.
Every time I write, I choose beginnings.
At 29, I have experienced over 10,500 beginnings.
When I am least trying to find beauty, I see it
on this rooftop library floor, wildflowers sway in the breeze
and in a glass building opposite me, my reflection:
tears surfacing, quickly—
The hurt, I remind myself, is temporary.
Like beauty. I catch beautiful things all the time.
I take the library stairs to find street corners.
Bubbles scatter in the air across and high above the city street.
I wonder at the source until I hear children playing in water.
On the bus, the bus driver helps a passenger catch her next bus.
I look out the window. Colorful murals and real estate
and fences. Music plays loudly. I look out the window.
Horns are honking. Frank Sinatra sings about life.
This Sunday afternoon becomes Sunday evening.
And the dangling moon is low in the sky, co-existing
in the same sky as the red sun,
the way it does outside of earth;
the universe holds everything, from feeling to fire.
I listen to everything. “Are we the drama?”
a man says, as he exits a car. I want an answer.
Claudia Rojas is a Salvadoran poeta who lives in northern Virginia. Claudia’s educational background includes a GED, an AA in Liberal Arts, a BA in English, and an MFA in Creative Writing. Her poems are published in the Acentos Review, the Northern Virginia Review, Fairfax County Public Library’s Branch Out magazine, and elsewhere. She has a full-length poetry manuscript under submission and consideration with publishers. To learn more, visit Claudiapoet.com.
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Beyond the Page is a quarterly feature highlighting creative work in partnership with other mission-driven literary organizations. This series specifically focuses on nonprofit institutions and collectives invested in social justice and human rights.
