*Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge, 2020. Photo: Russ McSpadden*

Entire mountainsides were being blown up, their green and tan living skins sloughing off to reveal the rock talc of their bones. Then the machines moved in, grinding, clawing, hauling – flattening. Ancient water was pulled from the earth and sprayed out by the truckload just to keep down the dust. This was – and is – the building of the border wall, slicing across the landscape of my heart, the land that raised me – and I was watching it all from the comfort of my own home.

This was 2020 after all. There was a pandemic raging and I was sheltering in place with Spring and the kids, then six years old. But of course not everyone would or could stay home. Even when I’d break quarantine to go into the streets to protest that hot summer, I would come home to this:

watching the destruction of the rising border wall on Twitter, via the camera lenses of those who were in the field doing the work of witness.

I didn’t know them personally then, but came to know their work intimately, near obsessively. Russ McSpadden and Laiken Jordahl were spending days and nights camped out in the remotest areas of the Arizona-Sonora borderlands. The world could watch the messy, unnecessary and destructive spectacle thanks to them. Others such as Amber Ortega (Hia Ced O’odham) and Nellie Jo David (Tohono O’odham) were physically putting their bodies and voices on the line to protect the land, water and living creatures.

Later I had the honor of meeting them ‘in real life:’ Amber was (an amazing!) featured poet at our Cultivating Culture series last year at Tucson’s Mission Garden, and I was introduced to Russ by the writer and artist Johanna Skibsrud. Turns out many of us were deeply traumatized by watching what had happened (is happening) to the land, especially those who saw, heard, and smelled it first hand.

Turns out poetry was key in helping Russ process what he had witnessed: the intricate and beautiful biocultural life of these diverse ecosystems riven by greed and steel.

(And here, let’s be clear: there has never been an “invasion” at the U.S.-Mexico border, and people have always – always – moved between regions. The border wall is unnecessary and ineffective in its stated goals. The true, primary function of the border wall continues to be a massive transfer of public wealth from the tax-paying, working people of the U.S. to the bank accounts of a network of ultra-wealthy Trump cronies and construction company owners who bribed him via “campaign contributions.” The definitive book has yet to be written on this, but in the meantime I highly recommend The Case for Open Borders by John Washington – more book recs below!)

Russ and I got to know each other as I joined him on trips in the field, and bonded during the successful civil disobedience that stopped former Arizona Governor Ducey’s stunt of building a border wall out of old shipping containers.

I was impressed as I read Russ’s poems. There’s a clarity and precision to them that creates a very human opening.

The pain of capitalist extraction juxtaposed with the beauty of parenting and the ecosystems that hold us.

I wanted the world to be able to witness not only the images of destruction, but also understand what was happening from the perspective of a human heart.

So after many conversations, Russ and I agreed that I should publish his debut book of poems.

see the book

I’ve had Artspeak Press for years. This was the imprint I used for my early chapbooks starting with Arroyo Ink in 2009, then shifting to support Spoken Futures Press in publishing youth poets throughout the 2010’s. More recently the Press was the logistics through which I published the run of NoVoGRAFíAS libros, but now I’m widening the focus to others’ work which I find urgent, necessary, and unlikely to easily find a route to publication otherwise.

Borderlings is the first. I hope there’s more to come.

One way to fight is to witness. Another is to put your body between the gnashing machines of destruction and all that is holy. Another is to amplify what you love, to bring work into the world that celebrates life and reminds us of what’s at stake.