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Heart Like a Window, Mouth Like a Cliff
Heart Like a Window, Mouth Like a Cliff | Sara Borjas
4 posts | 1 read | 1 to read
Poetry. California Interest. Latinx Studies. HEART LIKE A WINDOW, MOUTH LIKE A CLIFF is a transgressive, yet surprisingly tender confrontation of what it means to want to flee the thing you need most. The speaker struggles through cultural assimilation and the pressure to "act" Mexican while dreaming of the privileges of whiteness. Borjas holds cultural traditions accountable for the gendered denial of Chicanas to individuate and love deeply without allowing one's love to consume the self. This is nothing new. This is colonization working through relationships within Chicanx families--how we learn love and perform it, how we filter it though alcohol abuse--how ultimately, we oppress the people we love most. This collection simultaneously reveres and destroys nostalgia, slips out of the story after a party where the reader can find God "drunk and dreaming." Think golden oldiez meets the punk attitude of No Doubt. Think pochas sipping gin martinis in lowriders cruising down Who Gives a Fuck Boulevard.
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quote
decembersveryown
post image

“I know I exist.
Being a person is serious,
but I want to disperse
in someone‘s hands.
I want their embrace to soak
me up like a crisp sponge
and not depend on
their skin to hold
my hips in one bronze
canonical body, or scatter
my legs like we do
when we claim inheritance
among the classics.”

-from the poem, “De-colonial Love Poem”

Welcome to your new favorite poet, Sara Borjas. She definitely has made my list! I could post her poems all day...

quote
decembersveryown
post image

“Never forget
where you come from, my father told me as a little girl, scared
I might pull the ladder up behind me.”

-from “My Father Imagines Winning the Lotto”

This struck a chord especially with how easy it seems for people to forget their upbringing. Success doesn‘t mean never looking back but making sure the path is clearer for those next in line.

quote
decembersveryown
post image

“I fasten my earrings.
I clasp my bracelets and blood
returns to me. In my bedroom mirror,
I shine like a precious stone, emit my glint,
dress up as half-elegy for marriage
before I turn off the light, walk out,
and possibility slides back into its case,
ready, recognizable. Just like my mother,
I buy my own gifts. I play marriage
so I don‘t have to play dead.”

-from her poem “Half-Elegy for Marriage”

blurb
decembersveryown
post image

This is a book that I‘ve wanted since I first learned of it‘s existence. I‘m trying to get better at keeping track of who recommends what and I believe the poet Ángel García tweeted (just love when writers recommend other writers) about her book and so I learned about her poems that way. The title itself is enough to keep me thinking... After reading her poems online and reading rave reviews/interviews, I can‘t wait to read her collection entirely