As curators Marcelo Hernandez Castillo, Janine Joseph, and Esther Lin note in the introduction to Here to Stay: Poetry and Prose from the Undocumented Diaspora (Harper Perennial, 2024), this anthology was created following yearslong conversations where they intimately and earnestly discussed how their poetry reflected their lived experience and their psycho-spiritual needs as undocumented people. To further deepen this interrogation, theycalled upon undocumented and formerly undocumented folks as well as people from mixed-status families to not only share their poems, but reflections that would shed light on how “their art and lived experiences interact.”
Preceding each set of poems is a statement of poetics in which each poet offers a framework for understanding their work. In a world where much is discussed, often in cruel terms, about undocumented immigrants, this anthology thus offers a rare opportunity to witness how poets of undocumented experience witness themselves. Over and against the forces that attempt to circumscribe and delimit our existence, we present and discuss in this anthology the manifold ways in which we’ve struggled to expansively and subversively manifest ourselves on the page. As the editors point out, the anthology was born from the knowledge that as members of the undocumented diaspora, we are “best suited to theorize [our] poetry” and “best equipped to shape the lens through which we are studied.”
To continue the generative process of communal thought promoted by the anthology, I gathered with four poets to discuss the presence of non-human species in our work and metaphor as a key craft element giving rise to those depictions. Considering those poems that radically place us in relation to nonhuman beings by presenting scenes of metamorphosis or transfiguration, we look at what happens when we invest energy not in proving that we are human but in uplifting the monstrous, creaturely, toxic, and corrosive qualities projected onto us, while wondering how those imaginaries could help us shatter the fictions that would have us bound to one version of reality. What is ultimately affirmed in the conversation is what féi hernandez terms “a decolonial imaginary” and what Tobi Kassim describes as an ever-expanding, ever-revisited field of relation.
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Yes(sí): In his statement of poetics, Jan-Henry wrote that being undocumented “trained [him] to see, accept, and eventually celebrate all kinds of discontinuity and disjunction.” He adds that “for those of us whose lives are marked by breaks in lineage—childless queers, migrants in diaspora, refugees, exiles—art making can help mend the “unhealable rift” of being from but not of a place.” So, beginning there, in the gap opened up by our migration history, what are the gaps that each of you is trying to, if not mend, at least reveal, in your poetics? Jan-Henry, perhaps there’s more you want to say about the quote?
Jan-Henry Gray: So much of writing in general feels like you’re trying to make sense, like you’re trying to make the sentence make sense as you’re trying to understand the world, and I just feel that so much of this experience of living undocumented doesn’t make sense. It’s senseless and random and overtly cruel and circusy and bizarre. Poetry a lot of the time doesn’t make sense, and all those gaps of making sense in a poem are some of the things that are really exciting to me. In a way, it’s about allowing for gaps in writing, allowing for gaps in sense-making, even in conversation.
féi hernandez: There’s this beautiful place that we inhabit where we really don’t have the privilege of “making sense,” in the sense that we can’t and won’t be expected to play by the same rules. I don’t play by the same rules. In writing, we are expected to create a clear statement, a clear sentence, a thesis, to be direct. But I’m living within the context of the most make-believe shit: citizenship, with very real implications. So, I begin and end with fiction. For me, that caption is speaking of the typography of language, where each letter and each grammar mark is an army. Writing can’t ever be simple. And in the case that I do write something simple, it’s not: there is actually a guerrilla of people behind each letter mark who are angry and furious and are ready to pop off.
Tobi Kassim: There are people who relate to ideas like citizenship and nation-states as fictions. But you do have to cross a distance, you have to cross a gap to get to that view of the world. You kind of have to make a journey. And there are lots of people who don’t really have to make that journey. There’s actually a huge audience of readers who just have not had to make sense of or confront the senselessness of the world. They can’t speak from that senselessness. When you’re speaking from a place where you’ve become intimately engaged with a senselessness that dictates some of your emotions and some of your awareness, it’s hard to remember how that journey looks and hard to remember how that awareness occurs and then it’s also hard to cross that gap and say, “here’s what I’m bringing to you.”
Jesús I. Valles: I’m sitting with what féi offered about fictions as the genesis of so much of where we land when it comes to identifying as undocumented or formerly undocumented or part of an undocumented diaspora. It’s all deeply dictated by these fictions that we have been coerced into accepting, and that coercion has also happened because of the very material mechanisms that governments use to make that coercion feel less fictional. Absolutely it is fictional, and also the material consequence of citizenship is deeply felt. It is a fiction that begins the motor for slow death for a lot of people, or quick death depending on how that death is doled out.
Filling out an N-400, for example, is a very real thing. There’s nothing fictional about the amount of money you have to pay the government for those forms and the subsequent rejection or acceptance of them have very material consequences.
Yes(sí): In relation to this word fiction that is showing up, I’d like to point us to another section of Jan-Henry’s statement, where he writes that “writing is both a kind of forging and forgery.” Poets in some way are also in the business of lying or at least making use of artifice. I’d like us to turn our attention to metaphor and metaphorical language as that space of “forgery” and the imagination. Metaphors are also the reason why people are sometimes put off by poetry, by a feeling that poetic language is disconnected from reality. On the other hand, we know that metaphor serves an important function. Edward Hirsch quotes Percy Bysshe Shelley describing metaphorical language as that which “marks the before unapprehended relations of things and perpetuates their apprehensions.” What do you see metaphors doing in your work?
Valles: I feel apprehensive about metaphor, increasingly so these days. Having such a direct feed over the last sixteen months of images, video, and audio of the horrifying genocide committed by Israel against the people of Palestine, to watch the obscenity of bombings in Lebanon, of pagers exploding in the hands of children, I’ve been thinking about how to even write inside of that particular witnessing, as a person watching this from a phone, whose taxes are been funneled into this genocide.
Sometimes metaphor has allowed us to stray from talking about the thing as it is—and I’m not sure what I mean when I say “the thing as it is.” When we are writing about state violence, how might the metaphor or a kind of approach or orientation towards beauty—which is so much of what metaphor does—how might that particular orientation toward metaphor lessen, cushion, or calcify that violence? It becomes a moment of turn or virtuosity for the writer, and so it is the thing that is remembered about the piece while the circumstances that required the piece to be written are then sort of made into object, like when the work is stripped of its context and reduced to a carousel of graphics on Instagram. The metaphor then becomes the sort of currency or thing that tends to dull the impact of the violence that the poem was responding to. And so I’ve been asking, “What am I trying to get away from? In using metaphor, what am I not saying?” Poets traffic in metaphor, yes, but the state has their metaphors too, and they deploy them all the time.
Gray: Starting anything by being apprehensive about it is a great entry point. Because yes, we are suspicious of those in power. The thing I immediately thought of as I listened to Jesús is, “Is the metaphor’s role to cover or reveal?” So many times, you encounter metaphor in the world and you’re like, how clever, how virtuoustic, how inventive but that glitter kind of gets in the way and you lose the plot. What were the two unlike things? What was the relationship? It can cover up what’s really there, and sometimes plain speech is necessary in urgent times. Sometimes metaphor feels like a writing craft tool, but at its best, its purpose is to reveal, to see something in a brand-new way you will never forget. In that way it is actual magic, actual invention.
hernandez: I found writing because I was an activist. For me, to be a poet means it is mostly always about how do we get the new world statement clear? From my own positionality and where I am walking from, metaphor has become an opportunity. As a formerly undocumented person, I have given myself all of the liberties to be as free as I want and write whatever I want, however I want. Obviously I’m still being mindful of how tangibly visceral the world is in relation to it, but I’ve always just been a tool for the gods, for the universe, for the new world, irrespective of my circumstances.. A lot of other writers, specifically citizen writers, aren’t considering any of this. They’re not juggling any of these realms of existence and what they can or shouldn’t be writing about. They feel entitled by proximity and that is a very very dangerous choice. Therefore yes, I believe that there’s an ethics about how and what to write. There are so many citizen writers who are writing about undocumented people and for them it is a metaphor, even against their claim.
I especially become irritated by the responsibility that is put on us trans and (un)documented artists to always be the ones fact checking, making sure that the quantifications of things are correct because other, privileged folks, are lousy and lack self awareness. For example, I can write me and my people as gods. Why? Because we deserve that kind of power, even if only on the page. To trans undocumented and formerly undocumented folks, I say: do what you want. To everyone else, I have explicitly and high standard for what and how they are delivering according to their privilege. Because for us, writing is not about awards, and being published here or there; or getting this or that clout. Writing is not a luxury. Writing is not a luxury. It’s the documentation of our decolonial imaginary. But when we’re talking about citizen artists, I say, stop romanticizing the struggle. Metaphor allows for folks to be adjacent to identities and struggles not their own. It’s appropriation. We cannot remove values, morals; and ethics from the conversation of writing and writing to/that gets publish(ed).My elders teach me daily about authenticity, honesty, and love. How do we show up for people—genuinely? Don’t make it about you!
As a trans woman, by way of my two-spirit identity and having been undocumented for approximately 20 years of my life embodied in an undocumented state of mind (even post a long naturalization process), we cannot do more for ya’ll. For the first time in my life, I’m in this beautiful moment where I ask: When does art become mine? When can I just be with this poem and let it be how I want it to be without trying to teach, correct, or change injustice? Can’t I do that by existing and producing just as I am and for that sake alone? I do not think I’ll know the answer for this in this life.
Yes(sí): féi, I think you’re speaking to a feeling of groundedness, of being grounded in the body, in one’s experience of lived reality. I like thinking about metaphor in relation to Juan Ramon Jimenez’s quote “roots and wings. But let the wings take root and the roots fly.” Maybe what we are speaking to is that balance between the ground of reality and the metaphorical space of flight, of dream making and memory doing, and maybe that’s an internal check we have to do for ourselves that comes from our own processing.
I’d like for us to also discuss more explicitly how our metaphors and depictions of the undocumented self or of our undocumented communities contrast with the depictions that are made about us by citizens. As Jesús mentioned, the state is constantly using metaphors, often to describe immigrants. One of those most pervasive metaphors is the metaphor of the immigrant as alien. Alien was initially a legal term, but it wasn’t until science fiction writers started using it that the term came to be associated with the image of a green being or extraterrestrial monster. In Trump’s inaugural proclamation “Guaranteeing the States Protection Against Invasion,” the word alien is used no less than thirty-seven times. Language is happening against us, but what is our language doing? How are our metaphors and image constructs working against these depictions?
Kassim: I used to worry that we cared too much about animals, but I recently went to a local art exhibit in New Haven, and the first exhibit in the doorway was that of an artist who had done family portraits with spotted lanternflies. Lanternflies are these butterfly-moth-looking red bugs that the country declared an infestation, instructing people to kill them. The bug was native to somewhere across the Atlantic, but it ended up being shipped or trafficked here by some kind of commercial exchange, and now it could or [does] pose dangers to the ecosystem here.
When you’re telling people to kill a moth or deer, you end up marshaling a kind of anger there. The exhibit showed the lanternfly with a little backpack on or with a set of bills it had to pay, and it reminded me that there’s an emotional undertone to even telling people to eliminate a possibly dangerous insect species. It makes it so much easier to make that transfer to “these people” that are coming over, “these people” that are posing some kind of danger to your ecosystem, causing some kind of damage to whatever the world’s supposed to look like when you’ve committed to this version of the world.
Valles: One of my poems in the anthology imagines a moment of metamorphosis. It’s a moment where I’m thinking about all of us, undocumented and formerly undocumented people, and I think more specifically people who are in detention centers and prisons. In that poem, I’m fantasizing about what it might mean if we all develop these features, similar to those of insects we’ve come to call locusts or chapulines. What might happen if we developed the human-sized anatomies, physicalities, of these particular creatures? Part of that desire was exhaustion with the task of constantly having to prove that you are human. There is often this strange, internalized directive for artists and cultural workers to “fix” attitudes about immigration and immigrants; to humanize. That’s been the goal of so many cultural projects. To say that we are people too, we are human too.
I was really inspired by the work of people like Xandra Ibarra, La Chica Boom, who has this series of photos where she poses next to a life-size cockroach exoskeleton. Her proposition is that you constantly shed your skin only to become the same thing always over and over and again. For me, there is something really powerful about the insistence on animals and, specifically, insects. They have such an interesting history of adaptation and evolution, and they are more often than not, to echo what Tobi said earlier, the kinds of animals we tend to talk about as plagues or as invasive or threatening. There’s a part of me that’s like, what if we just lean into it actually? What if we just become as terrifying and corrosive as possible? What if I eat all your crops? What if I made a sound, what if we collectively made a sound, that terrified, that let you know we were coming, that you had no escape from?
I’ve also been thinking about metaphors and the language of toxicity and corrosiveness. I personally can say that this is not the world I want to be alive in. It’s the sentiment expressed by folks who do harm reduction work as they remember folks they’ve lost to substance abuse, “wish you were here, wish here was better.” I wish here was better. I wish here wasn’t a country. I wish here wasn’t a set of nations. I wish here was land and places and fruit and trees and a beach or a desert or all of these places where creatures already know how to live, where humans have also always known how to live.
What might it mean for “us”—a formation of people whose struggles are interconnected—to corrode the world as it is currently? For us to poison it, to eat it, to tear it apart, or to become allergen to it? So that it ends, so that something more like life can be here. So, I’ve been thinking a lot about toxicity as somebody from Juarez, Chihuahua, Mexico who grew up in El Paso from the age of nine. And I’ve been thinking a lot about the history of toxicity in that particular border and the chemical exposure from DDT and Cryolite because of the border gas baths to the smelter gas plant ASARCO. There is so much toxicity that has been designated as a natural element of the landscape of the EL Paso–Juarez border and part of me is like, how might we become poison? How might we become toxic to this place so that it’s forced to end or forced to change.
hernandez: I’m a huge gamer (mostly games with femme protaganosits) and recently, I was playing Pokémon Legends: Arceus, when, tell me why! you get deported from the village in the game! I bring this up because I’m a person that enjoys anime. I enjoy games, sci-fi films and fantasy, but I had never considered myself someone who writes sci-fi. But I think over the course of my life, it naturally started happening. It’s how I make sense of the world. I have a poem where every time you illegally migrate to futuristic USA you have to go to Lala, an elder woman who’s described as green-haired and blue-skinned, te hace una sobada, and gives you a cactus needle with honey and then buries you for three days so you can resuscitate and get the chip that they’ve planted out of you. It’s weird fucking shit and I’m like—it’s not hard to deduce how I got to this realm of creativity! It’s part of my disposition and how I make sense of new worlds, new possibilities, highlighting the fact that new worlds already exist in us.
We were talking a little bit about material realities. Yes, material realities are happening. We know they’re here, but where in this fight is the place of building, breathing, calling forth the new world? Where in this fight is the place of planting seeds or growing the seeds that have been planted? I am imaginative because my elders are storytellers. They are oral storytellers. I’m just an extension of them. It just so happens that in my lifetime, a mi me toco ser la escritora, to be the one that documents the undocumented experience. And by that I mean: the Indigenous predecessors, practices, the tongues—I’m speaking of the transness and two-spiritedness. It’s about the migration. All of it tangled with the other.
I have been so attuned to fantasy and sci-fi because it’s been where I feel at home, it’s where the chimera that I am makes sense. I see it especially in my drawings, where there’s always transfiguration: instead of feet, there’s talons. Instead of hands, there’s hooves, and there’s always horns. It’s this permission to be the monster the USA fears—It’s how I get to be the scary thing that Fox News reports about terrified as fuck. Something that my elders have taught me is this way of existing, not inwardly and in an isolated way outside of community but in relation to community, understanding that I am the radiating new world. And that is the commitment that I’ve made with myself and all of my people: that the more I can radiate this truth and use my resources, my art, my writing, my voice, as this force, then I am also going to rattle everybody else.We are here to rattle the world. Isn’t that the only way things will change?
What I can offer at this moment is being the walking new world, not overlooking the realities of things—I can’t overlook the realities of things, I’m a trans woman operating in the world, daily. I must exist in my brilliance, the radiance of the new world. We are it.
Yes(sí): I appreciate what féi is naming about making a new world or crafting an elsewhere space of our own making, and maybe those things can exist simultaneously. Maybe we can be “here” with our consciousness somewhere else. In that way, I think we are already kind of like aliens or extraterrestrial beings.
And yet, while we have that intention of making or being an elsewhere in the “here” we inhabit, we know that the threats of expulsion are real. Lots of the poems in the collection depict scenes of flight or fugitivity from the forces that are hunting us down, and it’s in that process of fleeing that they carve out new maps or new worlds. Is there anything you’d like to add about that relationship between flight and map-making or world-making?
Camille Dungy’s anthology Black Nature is also instructive here. That collection reminds us that historically for Black poets, the relationship with nature has not been born out of a pure or simple desire for peace, but “as a necessity of spiritual and physical survival.” I think something similar can be said of the poems in the anthology. Is there anything you would like to add about how we—poets from the undocumented diaspora who live at the intersections of other identities and additional forms of oppression—might be specifically relating to nature or expanding the field of ecopoetics?
Kassim: I both love, and I’m worried about the P. B. Shelley quote mentioned earlier. He says that metaphor “marks the before unapprehended relations of things and perpetuates their apprehension,” but I’m never excited about longer apprehension. I have a desire for ongoing marking, remarking, re-noticing, renaming. The moment I decide on my relationship to something else and insist on it being that way, that thing is locked. So, I love that quote because yeah, poetry does do something to relation. It does understand and notice and reveal relation in a really important way, and maybe when he said it perpetuates, he actually meant like makes more apprehension possible, but I read it as ongoing apprehension.
I wanted to start there because I think the object of that sentence is relation. It’s always about understanding what is going on between things, what is going on in the exchange. It’s never about privileging one’s position or the other. I think when it comes to nature, that’s what I want. Obviously the experience of Blackness and the experience of fugitivity that literally required flight across landscapes and required flight across the wilderness is ongoing. It’s not that Black people once escaped apprehension at the hands of the law and now nature is somehow approachable. I think Black people, undocumented people, people of color are always under pressure of apprehension at the hands of the law. It’s a system of relation I think we’re always representing where we ask: you’re still chasing us, why? What is going on that we are the object of desire for apprehension and desire for scattering as opposed to a different relation?
Making room for how that relation can actually develop involves the voices of the fugitives saying: I see nature differently. I am actually part of nature. My voice is part of nature. My voice is in the woods. My voice is the woods. That’s a big part of marronage, it’s like actually existing in the trees and not being locatable because you’re just in the trees, making noises. The journey that people make away from capture hopefully is a journey toward wide relation and wide understanding of relation and wide understanding of the protection and the protectiveness of relation. Hopefully what we apprehend is an ongoing possibility of relation.
Valles: That’s such a lovely offering, Tobi. If the state exists alongside nature, then fugitivity is always the condition of people who are made noncitizens. And obviously, you’re speaking specifically about marronage and so now I’m thinking about fugitivity via indigenous and Black solidarities. If the sole purpose of the state is capture, how might we think about the apprehension of metaphor as something otherwise than that? Thinking about the work of Tiffany Lethabo King and also the work of Dixa Ramirez-D’Oleo, how might we think about attunement instead?
I’m thinking about ecological attunements and how the fugitive knows the landscape because the landscape is seen by the colonial eye as something unlivable, uninhabitable, but the fugitive understands it at a physical level, like quite literally at a visceral level because you learn how to navigate it and make life inside of it. I think some of the things our work might be reaching for collectively—especially when we turn to the world of animals, to nature, to the land as it is outside of the state and buildings and systems of government—is a reaching for, a kind of promising that there’s something after this. A here that is not here. Not a country but a here like the water here in Austin, the lake and the rivers, the desert in El Paso, the swamps that are so often seen as uninhabitable.
It’s also difficult to talk about capture and apprehension in light of the state’s disappearance of Mahmoud Khalil, who was a voice against Columbia’s participation in the ongoing genocide in Palestine. It is difficult to think through fictions and not note that the state has now openly acknowledged that, green cards? We made that shit up. It’s words and plastic and means nothing to us. We are here in the service of perpetuating the state in this particular way, through this particular violence. It’s lovely to be in conversation today with people who want a here that is not this, a here where we’re here, and Mahmoud Khalil is not in detention and gets to witness the birth of his child; a here where Palestine is free.
Gray: I wasn’t expecting so much discussion of dreaming ahead, dreaming beyond, looking a million stadiums away, galaxies away. And thank you for bringing in Camille Dungy’s anthology. It’s beautiful. The thing about nature is, the joke’s on us, the joke’s on civilization. Nature’s got it. We’re the ones fucking it up. The few times I have been fully naked in nature, I don’t want to be talking about citizenship. That’s what I mean about the joke’s on us. You spend any time in nature and you’re like, how small is my life? How small and how dumb and how ridiculous are these rules? How much paper have I had to go through? How many forms, how many envelopes, how many stamps, how many interviews, how many? And nature is all there to teach us and show us. This experience is so lonely making, and the world is a horror, but yes to the light, I’m all for that, for describing these worlds and dreaming them up.
hernandez: The piece I got accepted into the anthology is literally rethinking all of this. Essentially, I started blurring the lines of mysticism and dream world magic versus these android canines. People want to say these are fictions, but this is our lived reality. So, I wrote the most outlandish and mystical dream-walk-hunt—that’s what it’s called—and it’s these androids chasing my ass through the forest. I’m turning into a fucking deer. Mother Earth is shifting the terrain. But even then, my distress, my call-out to the universe, to my grandmas, to my mom, is the refrain: “Are they going to chase us here too? Are we undocumented here too? Are we illegal here too?
My new book coming out is titled (Un)Docu Mente. I’m a naturalized citizen, but going back to these fictions, even in other poems I’ve written, the question is, “Mom, are we actually safe now with this green card? Mom, are we actually safe now with this naturalized citizenship?” Because it is fiction. There’ll be a moment when you know what? Any naturalized citizen from the last ten years is also going to get deported because . . . fiction . . . because we said so. These questions have always been at the root of my work: What is reality? What is fiction? How are they collapsing on each other?
Lastly, to tie it in with ecopoetics, something that I learned specifically by learning Rarámuri, the tongue of my people, and being in relation to my people who are diasporic or detribalized within the context of Chihuahua, Mexico, is a way of thinking about place and where I belong. Let’s zoom out real quick: if I have Pima descendants and there’s Pima People in Arizona and they extend down to the Pima Bajo people in Chihuahua, Mexico, which is also part of my lineage, then what came first? Not Mexico and not the US. Those are nation-states, so y’all want to vilify, but I’m like the most natural thing here.
The conversation with geography has been that for me. What do you do then as my reader, what do you do as a settler? If we want to talk about settler colonialism, we also can’t remove ourselves from being implicit in that because, bitch, I grew up repping Inglewood, but then the Tongva people? You’re repping your hood, but who was there before it was Inglewood? There’s this constant unearthing that for me and Mother Earth guides me. It centers me. It returns me to the truth which is my body, which is the nature of our bodies, the human of our bodies. It’s like the most normal thing.
Those are the two things I juggle: normalcy in the most raw and cosmic way. And then fiction. How can I create fiction to counteract the fictions that are fictioning against me? And then create the new world.
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féi hernandez (b.1993, Chihuahua, Mexico) is a two spirit/trans woman, (un)documented writer, visual artist, and healer. She is a 2023 Lambda Literary fellow and 2022 Tin House Scholar. féi is the author of HOOD CRIATURA (Sundress Publications, 2020), the forthcoming (UN)DOCU MENTE (Noemi Press, 2025) and CHABÓCHI DOLL (Abode Press, 2026). féi’s poetry/ prose is published in Los Angeles Review of Books, POETRY, Academy of American Poets, Hayden Ferry’s Review, Oxford Review of Books, TransLash Media, Somewhere we are Human( Harper Collins, 2022), Here to Stay (Harper Collins, 2024), Split This Rock, F News Magazine, and more. féi is descendent of the Pi’ma, Rarámuri, and Cora peoples. Candidate for SAIC MFAW, class 2026. For more of her projects, designs, services and products visit: feihernandez.com
Jan-Henry Gray is the author of Documents, selected by D.A. Powell as the winner of BOA Editions’ Poulin Poetry Prize, and the chapbook Selected Emails. His poems have been included in various anthologies, including Here to Stay: Poetry and Prose from the Undocumented Diaspora (HarperCollins, 2024), Permanent Record (Nightboat, 2024), as well as Essential Queer Voices of U.S. Poetry, Queer Nature, and Nepantla: An Anthology for Queer Poets of Color. He’s received fellowships from Undocupoets, the Cooke Foundation Award, and Kundiman. He was born in the Philippines, raised in California, and worked as a chef for over 12 years. He is an assistant professor at Adelphi University and teaches in their low-residency MFA program.
Tobi Kassim was born in Ibadan, Nigeria and currently lives in New Haven, CT. His work has been supported by a Stadler Center Undergraduate fellowship and an Undocupoets fellowship. He won Yale University’s Sean T. Lannan poetry prize. His poems have been published in The Volta, The Brooklyn Review, The Hampden Sydney Poetry Review, Zocalo Public Square, and elsewhere.
Jesús I. Valles (they/them) is a queer Mexican immigrant writer-performer from Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua/El Paso, Texas. Their poems have been featured in the anthologies Here to Stay, Somewhere We Are Human, and The Breakbeat Poets Vol. 4: LatiNext, as well as New Republic, Tin House, [PANK], Adroit Journal, the Slowdown podcast, and Code Switch. Here, Valles wishes to echo Rasha Abdulhadi’s call to “you, dear reader, to refuse and resist the genocide of Palestinian people. Wherever you are, whatever sand you can throw on the gears of genocide, do it now. The elimination of the Palestinian people is not inevitable. We can refuse with our every breath and action. We must.” In solidarity with the people of Palestine, of Congo, of Sudan, of Yemen, of Cuba, with every political prisoner here and everywhere empire threatens life, with every student movement rebelling against their state everywhere.
