In a zine that she mailed me earlier this year, Love Spell for a Dying Empire (i don’t make the desire, i follow), she writes: “Are there any real lovers left? Love of the narrative, the ritual, the theater, the endurance. Love of the long game in a culture of immediacy, transaction, and convenience. Love as wayward strolling, dead ends, and growing pains. As dissolution of self, dialectical process, irrational surrender.”

Lupita Limón Corrales’s first poetry collection, ESTA BOCA ES MÍA, is a testament to the dissolution of self, to the collective voice; it is also a tribute to revolutionaries and to the struggle against everything from housing inequity to imperialism. The book was made in collaboration with and published by nueoi press, translated by language justice interpreter Alexia Veytia-Rubio. It includes contributions from Lupita’s friends and comrades.

Lupita’s poems quake with love and with a sense of the responsibility we owe to each other, as she writes in “Earth Debt”: “There are no human rights but there are human / obligations. You pay your landlord’s debt / when your neighbor is yours to keep.” I myself am indebted to Lupita for this conversation, in which we discuss discipline, slowness, God, trees, and how to make something more than what it is. We remain indebted, all of us, to the freedom fighters, to those who tend to trees, to Emma Goldman, Daisy Zamora, Leila Khaled, and to poets, real poets, who recalibrate our futures and keep our spirits sharp and alive.

[Ed. note: This interview has been edited for length and clarity.]

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Mallika Singh: I’m just in love with your book. I first heard about your poetry through my friend Sophia Garcia, who talked to me about the ways you share your poems, which was really exciting and special to me. You tend to share your poetry outside of the art world and outside of writing institutions. I saw a video recently of you sitting on a balcony sharing a poem, or maybe a song, with a banner on the balcony that said “NOT FOR SALE.”

How do you decide where to share and how to share? How does it feel to share poems at a meeting or an action?

Lupita Limón Corrales: I started writing poetry when I was really little. My dad taught me how to read before I spoke English. I’ve always been writing in my notebooks and making cards and poems and little books for people. I wrote a lot of letters to my dad growing up. It wasn’t until early adulthood that I started to meet people who had gone to art school and were in an art world. I went to a nearby state school and took a couple of creative writing classes, but I never thought of it as more than a hobby. Then I got this internship at a political poster archive in Culver City. At the internship, I got to work with a collection of 90,000 political posters from all over the world. They were social movement posters. They weren’t election or campaign posters, they were leftist organizing tools.

I learned so much about the world. All my co-workers were gay and cool and were teaching me about abolition and communism and international politics and labor movements in the U.S. I was also handling all these materials from Mexico and seeing organizing that was happening in the country I was born in but haven’t been back to. A lot of undocumented organizing that was happening in the U.S. was also archived through this collection. My politics were developing and I was seeing how important it was to leave a record. I was seeing how important it was to organize people through images and language.

It was visceral for me, what these artworks and organizing and pedagogical and design tools were doing. Then I started working at this contemporary art museum in downtown LA, and all of my coworkers were young artists who had moved to LA to try and work on their career. Everyone’s attitude was like, I went to this art school and I went to that art school and I’m having an exhibition and here’s my business card. I was so intimidated by everybody. I was like, “Oh my gosh, I must be working with famous artists. If they have a business card and an exhibition, they must be huge.”

It was a little bit of a culture shock for me. It was very different for me to be in that environment. A part of me was put off by it, but another part of me was envious. How come I don’t call myself an artist? Why is that such an embarrassing thing for me to think of? I started to take my poetry, zines, and bookmaking more seriously. I started taking more classes and developing a skillset in that way.

I’ve never had a direct relationship with any kind of literary institution or literary space. So I’ve just shown and shared work wherever I can. I made zines for years, poetry zines and collage zines. It’s all been organic and slow. It’s taken many years for people to start to respond to my writing. I’m happy that it happened slowly and privately for a while because there came to be a point where I thought, oh, my poetry is really good now. For a while I was just stumbling through and my writing was more for me and to share my world with my friends. As I started to become involved with different spaces and movements, I was being entrusted with people’s stories and observations. I started to feel a little bit more like I had something to say.

I think my first poetry reading that wasn’t an open mic or something random was in 2021. That was after the deeper lockdown part of the pandemic and I was really nervous to read poems in front of people, but there I met someone who invited me to the next thing. And then my friend, who I’ve known for ten years and met through the political poster archive, got married at Echo Park Lake and her wedding was also a direct action and she asked me to read some poems.

I told her something like, “I don’t have love poems for a wedding.” And she said, “All your poems are love poems, come on, come read them.” My poems just keep taking on a life of their own that’s really fluid. People have printed them out and read them in meetings as a mística, as a way to connect and ground before getting into the business of the day. Or at a community day at an encampment in Van Nuys. I’m not in a lot of poetry and literary spaces, so my poems are in all of the spaces I inhabit. There’s a lot of intimacy in the way that they’ve been shared.

MS: I agree, all your poems are love poems! I studied poetry in undergrad. I was exposed to a lot of experimental poets, political poets, and ways of sharing poetry. Still, I started to get really annoyed with poetry readings where you go listen, chit chat, and then leave. It felt distant from the audience. Over the last few years, with friends and collaborators, when we’ve put on an event or a reading, we talk about how to make it more sonic, more interactive, or have it be something more than a reading.

I want poetry that is shared with an audience that’s not only poets or artists. I want many people to be able to participate. When you share poems, how does the audience feel? Have you made unexpected connections with people through the sharing of your poems?

LLC: Definitely. In 2020, I printed a zine, my first poetry zine called No Angels Left. I compiled a bunch of poems from over a couple of years, and I sold it towards mutual aid, as a fundraising tool, and half of the proceeds went to a family whose sole breadwinner had gotten detained and was facing deportation and we were organizing to try to defend him. He did get deported, so half of the funds from the zine went to his family, and the other half was going to a different family that I met through an anarchist mutual aid project.

This elder was returning to his home country for the first time since leaving decades prior, to bury a family member. He’s undocumented, so he wouldn’t be able to come back, but he was taking this risk to go back, and we raised thousands of dollars through a GoFundMe that was circulating. People were giving without any expectation of a return, but I was also fundraising by selling the zines and a lot of people were buying the zine just because they wanted to support this cause, and some people just wanted the poetry, and it just so happened that they were also participating in mutual aid. I raised a few hundred dollars, and that was the first time all of these people learned I was a poet.

Then the next year, I made another zine, called Voy a Vivir Para Siempre. That year half of the funds were going to the Liyang network because one of my roommates was organizing with them. They work with the people of the Philippines to defend their way of life and their land and their communities and schools. The other half went to my other roommate who just couldn’t pay the rent that month. It was cool because this organization was promoting the zines, and people who shared my values and politics were learning about my poetry. It’s social and fun, but also aligned and feels good.

Again, the next year, I made another one. That one’s called Bravery Watermelon Blood. This was one of my favorites. I wrote a lot that year. Half of the funds went to my friend Dont, an elder in L. A. who organized with ACT UP and helped found the L.A. Tenants Union with other organizers and movement lineages. He was recovering from his third open-heart surgery and was disabled and needed support. The other half went to a family in Highland Park that was fighting their eviction. I think there’s always a way to make it more than what it is, it requires a lot of time and depth but it does reach all of these people. I write poems about the people that I organize with and they’re shocked. You know? It’s just such a gift.

MS: I had noted your poem, “Divinity’s Guest,” your poem about Gaza, because it felt so connected to your own experience and your own observation. It was considerate and thoughtful, and didn’t seem to be engaging with that rush of, this is happening in the world, so I have to write about it. It felt in relation to every other poem and every other moment in the book.

I feel you on, in a way, keeping your poetry pure. I’ve similarly felt that I don’t want my poetry to become too entangled in bureaucracy, funding, or jobs, it allows for more freedom in who you choose to work with, where you choose to share it and even how you make the book object itself. How did you choose to make this as an object? What was the process like? Where are your hands in it?

LLC: Well, thank you for your observations about that poem. This book was a huge collaboration between me and Yves. Yves is the genius behind nueoi press and I met Yves through zines. They bought my zines, and I went to go take them to them, which they wrote about in the editor’s note. We have mutual friends, we’ve done karaoke together, and over the years we’ve seen each other at parties and readings. For a while they kept saying they wanted their next book to be my work. I didn’t want it to just be a collection of my other poems, I wanted it to be something new, so I said no to it for a while. They insisted, which I appreciate. Yves really cares about books as objects and cares about each book that they make, having something new about it, is the way that they put it… Yves really understands my work and my aesthetic and my politics and my world, and so they were really supportive and encouraging, and they took the lead with a lot of the book design and construction—which was amazing, because I wouldn’t have ever thought of this extremely labor-intensive way of making a book.

I’m bilingual and in my organizing, everything that we do is in English and Spanish, so when I’m leading a meeting, I’m often saying a long-ass thing in English and a long-ass thing in Spanish. I also interpret professionally for work, and my family mostly only speaks Spanish, and a lot of the people I organize with mostly only speak Spanish. Every document that we make in our tenant union, we make in both languages, each email that we send, because we want everybody to be fully on the same page and to not prioritize one language over the other. Having support and resources through Yves meant that it was possible to have the book be bilingual. We reached out to Alexia Veytia-Rubio, who translated all of the poems and who trained me in language justice as an interpreter years ago and who I was a part of a language justice committee in the tenants union with.

We had a tiny budget, like the budget was Yves’s income. At a certain point we got a $1,000 grant from Heavy Manners, which is great, but we’re still not working with a lot. Without the relationship and Alexia’s generosity and investment in Yves’s small press—Alexia was familiar with them, and she said, “I love your book and I love Lupita. I’m gonna do it. I would do it for a can of sparkling water.” Alexia’s translations are beautiful, these beautiful poems. That’s a whole other body of work.

I also invited a few friends to write poems for it and it ends with those ones. I just asked them, “Hey, do you want to contribute a poem?” Because again: how can I make it more special? How can I make it more collective? How can everybody be there? Each of them is already a character in the book, so what if they got to be poets in the book, too? I didn’t tell them to write about me, but each person did. Then I became a character, too.

MS: So sweet. You’ve mentioned all these people throughout your poems, and then they get to tell stories about you.

LLC: I know. It’s so cute. I shared the collection with them ahead of time, so they chose to make some connections… It’s all printed on Yves’s home printer—I don’t even know how they conceptualized all this, but we had to learn how to gather them into these folios, and then cut the books and glue, so each one takes almost three hours to make. From an economic perspective… well, it’s not about that. At first Yves was like, what do you think? Should we sell them for $16? And at first I said, “Yeah do it.” But I want people to be able to buy it. That’s why we don’t just have a surplus of them: they take a while to make, and some people get impatient. I think people want it to move a little faster. But as always, slow.

MS: You’re into the slowness.

LLC: I’m into slowness for my poetry.

MS: I’m noticing they’re a bit different, because mine is a green binding.

LLC: Yeah, that’s also really cool. Each one is a little bit different. They’re all unique. Some of the early ones we were just learning how to do the binding, and then I think we figured out little hacks to be more efficient or bought multiple different colors of thread and kind of switched it up. The poems are one thing that I worked on for a long time alone. Then I got to see them be transformed into translations, and then I got to see all of those be transformed into a book. And my friends contribute. And it’s like a big pot of soup.

MS: I resonate with Alexia’s note about the translation. It’s not an exact copy. It’s an echo of the poem, but it’s also its own poem. In that way, you have multiple authors in here.

LLC: We had a little back and forth sometimes because I’m from Sinaloa, and my family speaks a regional and colloquial Sinaloan Spanish, with its own slang and its own syntax. Alexia grew up on the border of San Diego, Tijuana, but I think her family’s from Mexico City. And her Spanish is really, really good. She’s fully bilingual and is a professional translator. And she’s a poet. She’s got all these layers of language knowledge. There’s times where her choices were so beautiful and poetic, but I felt like, this poem’s about my dad and my tío, and they wouldn’t say it like this, and there was times where I was down for things to be grammatically incorrect or to be Spanglish or something, and so it’s a negotiation because ultimately she’s the translator and it’s her work too. I think it’s beautiful having to negotiate. There were moments where I was like, “Whoa, I would not have thought of that.” These turns of phrase where there’s some poems that I like more in Spanish because she added her own sassiness or touch to it.

MS: I wanted to ask you about trees. I read your essay in Protean Magazine. [Ed. note: Read Lupita Limon Corrales’s 2021 piece that appeared in our pages, published online here.]

LLC: “There are Trees in the Future, or, a Case for Staying.”

MS: Amazing title. I also noticed the image at the beginning of your chapbook, with these two tree trunks entwined around a pillar. After that, I was looking for trees in the book. Which I noticed, of course, in the poem about Leila Khaled, and in a poem about your Dad. Were trees a natural theme for the book? Is there a particular way that you think about trees?

LLC: You might have read this: my dad is an arbolero, him and all my uncles cut and remove trees for a living. That’s what my dad started doing when he migrated to the U.S., and then later me and my mom joined him. Most of the men in my family dedicate themselves to that work. So, you know, any time my dad dropped me off at a friend’s house, if they had trees, he gave me a business card, and was like, you have to give this to their parents. He always came home, covered in debris, covered in leaves. He’s not passionate about a lot, but he’s really passionate about trees. There were a couple years where I worked with him and my uncles, and kind of assisted with carrying the branches out and handing over tools and doing some of the easier trimming and stuff, and it was a really good way to bond and connect and work towards a common goal together. So trees have just been a really big part of our livelihood and something I grew up with.

I was also reading about Leila Khaled, and olive trees obviously have so much material and symbolic significance in Palestine. In the same way that an entire people have and are being uprooted from their land, it’s also maybe a precursor or a mirror, the way that these olive trees that are so sacred and significant, and are material embodiments of histories and generations. They’re also a livelihood, there’s a lot of people who depend on these trees economically, and part of the violence of occupation has been to remove these trees—which, in a world that doesn’t value life, that only values property and efficacy and control over landscape, makes sense. But to care about a tree and to honor them, revere them, see them as worth protecting and living alongside… for me, it’s an encapsulation of a bigger commitment to something outside of ourselves, something outside of our control, something outside of our lifetime.

My dad and my uncles also remove trees and they make their living off that, so it’s not like they’re always treating them with sacredness, but they do view the world through trees. When we drive around together, my dad says things like, that tree needs to be trimmed or see that hill used to have all of this stuff, but we came in and we cleaned it up. His whole orientation around Los Angeles is based on trees. He is somebody who, in a lot of ways, sadly, embodies individualism and assimilation and we don’t always see eye to eye, but he has this real care and orientation around trees, and how could you not? They’re bigger than us, and they mark things. I almost feel that’s why they’re threats to colonialism, because they’re markers of time and space, and they remind you that there is more than just you and today. I think I was reading or watching a documentary about Leila Khaled, and there was a line where they said, “the freedom fighters will sleep under a tree for three days.”

MS: Right. The fighters say they will sleep under a tree / for three days when Palestine is finally free.

LLC: Yes!

MS: I can picture your dad driving around LA and orienting himself through the trees. It makes sense, especially since it’s his job, but otherwise as well to understand the geography through trees, because many other parts of the city might change. Recently, I saw a picture of 85-year-old mango and jujube trees, totally intertwined. I’ll send you the picture. The picture was from Gurdwara Sri Darbar Sahib in Kartarpur, Pakistan on the border of Pakistan and India. It’s one of few places that is accessible to pilgrims from both countries, or both sides of the border. These trees have been growing together for 80-plus years, they’ve been growing since before there even was a border. I think that is just, I’m not sure what the right word is, correct, or true. Like, this has been here. The rest of this shit is fake.

LLC: Exactly. Joy Harjo has a poem that says, “Anything that matters is here. Anything that will continue to matter in the next several thousand years will continue to be here.” I tend to think zoomed out a lot. My friends are always saying, you always talk about the future, but just as a vague idea. I think because everything is so hard and scary, the details of it all, and this feeling of zooming out alleviates a lot of anxiety.

MS: I noticed that in your writing, your poems are angelic, and God keeps coming up. They feel heavenly yet so grounded. You have zoom-out and specificity happening at the same time, which makes for a very effective poem. Do you have any particular relationship to God? How do you engage with God in your poetry?

LLC: My brother is a theologian. He studied theology and got his Master’s in divinity, and I used to think that we didn’t have that much in common. We used to be so opposite, he was becoming a theologian, and I was a crazy party girl, and we would butt heads all the time. Over the last few years, his study has taken him to a place where, in his seminary school, people thought he was a heretic or an atheist. His study of God led to him moving away from God as a figure and a deity, and more towards God as a life force, a spirit, and a unifying means towards purpose and community. He went towards Christian anarchism and talked to me about writings outside of the Bible, where Jesus actually frees prisoners from hell, and he told me how the term Jesus is Lord was treason, because at that time, in the Roman Empire, all of the coins said Caesar is Lord, and to replace the name of the ruler with this carpenter who hung out with sex workers and flipped tables was a direct political threat. There are political reasons why he was crucified beyond the religious reasons that we read about.

It’s interesting because we didn’t grow up in a very religious household. We grew up in a household where Catholicism was practiced, but we didn’t go to Catholic school, and we didn’t have to go to church. My parents are also a little witchy at times. They do rituals, or light candles. Or there’s even New-Age-y ways that they engage with ideas of faith—when I didn’t have a job, they were like, you just need to hang up a professional outfit. And light a green candle. I feel like we grew up with a strong emphasis on faith, but with a lot of freedom in how to practice it, and my brother took a very traditional route that led to him being a total radical.

A lot of people in my life have had traumatic relationships with religion, and they don’t have that freedom to choose what they like and what they resonate with. They’re turned off from the idea, or there’s guilt, or there’s shame. A lot of folks in my family, or that I organize with, especially in immigrant families, have faith in maybe more Catholic and Christian ways. It’s a big part of what keeps people going and what keeps people thinking at a larger scale—similar to trees. People are willing to take risks and care about justice and care about their neighbor because of their spiritual and religious values.

I know there’s been so much harm done in the name of religion, so much violence and war. And you see it in people’s daily lives as a way to keep moving forward and not let the bullshit of daily life pain you. I feel like there’s so much lack of meaning and purpose and belonging. For me, too, it’s very easy to feel depressed and to give up because things are so, so painful and violent and seemingly impossible. I keep trying to find these anchors and bigger things to latch on to, which is why I organize, why I write poetry, why I love trees, and why I love God.

MS: Sometimes in Western left organizing, there’s a resistance to God and spirituality and religion. On one hand, I understand, but spirituality and religion are also a part of resistance movements. Resistance can be rooted in deep faith. Maybe it’s ideally both, the way you have this balance in your poems. I don’t want to turn to God and spirituality as a way to neglect or abandon our material, day-to-day reality.

LLC: I think that that’s so true. It’s a balance between having that faith and belief in a future, or something bigger than you, but also being grounded in material action. For your faith to give you the capacity to confront reality, to be something that nourishes you or reaffirms your commitment, and not an escape, right?

MS: That’s the perfect way to put it. In the Editor’s Note to the zine, Yves said that you came into the library like an angel. It’s so cyclical, the way you bring your friends and community into your writing.

LLC: It’s just so lovely, it’s a whole little world. I think June Jordan said, “Poetry means taking control of the language of your life.” And I have to be in control of the vocabulary of my life, and I feel like also of our collective lives. There’s certain ideas that I’ll write about, and then the people around me start to talk about it, or vice versa, you know. A material thing happens, but then we need language and ideas to make sense of it. It’s a little bit of a dialectic where on its own, it’s just an act. We need language to shape and connect and decide what that act meant to us. Things can easily get interpreted into something that’s not revolutionary. For me, that’s what language can do. It builds this practice and this trust, so when there are moments that we need to make sense of, what comes next can be, because what comes next is based on the way that we understand it.

MS: We need language to decide what the act means to us! When I write poems, sometimes I’m writing, writing, putting something together, I will read a lot, research a lot, but I don’t make sense of it until I step back from the poem. Then I have clarity. Then I can see the connections I was making, but I have to write it first, before I understand it.

LLC: It’s a back and forth. It’s turning inward, turning to the world, turning inward, turning to the world.

MS: Yes! I’m wondering what you were reading when you were making this book. I would also love to hear more about the three revolutionaries you write about in the book: Emma Goldman, Daisy Zamora, and Leila Khaled.

LLC: Yes! The three poems. One of them is for Emma Goldman. I was in Philly last year, and I bought this high schoolers’ book. It’s kind of crazy that they made this book for high schoolers. It’s called The Importance of Emma Goldman. It got withdrawn from the high school collection, for obvious reasons. It was at Memorial High School in the Edgewood Independent School District. It’s about Emma Goldman and all of the assassination attempts on her, and about her childhood, her politics, and her old age. She sounds totally nuts in some ways. She was a polyamorous, violent anarchist in the 1800s. She was dating this guy and his cousin, and they were all organizing together. Some of the men were like, “Wow, you’re such a good speaker, you should be the face of anarchist thought.” They were feeding her ideas and she was preaching to people. Eventually she realized she knew more than them and started doing her own thing. She apparently was a party girl—she was dancing too hard at this fundraiser until all of the men were like she’s not serious, she’s not a real one, she’s so frivolous, she’s embarrassing us. And she said, I don’t want a revolution where I can’t dance. That was one of the books that I read as I was starting my book.

Also when I was starting this book, I was dating somebody, and I found this book of love poems by Daisy Zamora at the library, and I was sending him the love poems. It was a bilingual book, and I was like, Oh my gosh. I love you. Here’s these poems. And then I didn’t know that she was also a guerilla soldier. I started looking into it and learned she was a part of the Sandinista Revolution. She was in armed struggle as a young teenage girl, and now she teaches poetry at San Francisco University, but she became the Vice Minister of Culture for the new regime in Nicaragua after the success of the revolution. I was also reading that a lot of the women who took up arms during this revolution were later cast aside by the men who became the new regime. Actually, I sent Daisy Zamora my poem. She’s read my poem, but I would love to have a reading with her.

The third is Leila Khaled. I read parts of her autobiography, but also was learning so much in all this media that was being created. All three of them are radical women with different ideas, technologies, different contexts, different national struggles, but also different ways of viewing national struggle. They all didn’t shy away from violence either. I was turning 30 when I was writing this, and I was having all of these gendered crises about age which I never had before. I think everybody was kind of like, you’re 30 now, have you ever thought about having kids? And what about this and what about that? And I just was like, “Oh my God, what? Why is everybody asking all these questions all of a sudden?” I was reading Forugh Farrokhzad at the time, and she died at 32 and then I was reading Simone Weil, who died at 34 and I was just like, wow, there’s so many cool, radical women, and they must have grappled with the questions I’m grappling with, of, how do you live a life as a woman and as somebody who cares about politics. There was a lot swimming around. So that’s where those three poems came from.

The poem “Coincidence of Want” was after I read an introduction to Marxist economics, based on Capital, but it was more legible for the modern reader. Marx writes a lot about linen, many of his examples are about linen and bread in thinking about exchange values. I turned it into a love poem.

MS: That’s one of my obsessions, how systems of state violence pervade moments of intimacy, but also how intimacy gives us language and the ability to shape our politics, and to shape our actions. Intimacy is where you live, learn. I think Yves said this about you too, how you’ve shaped your politics in intimate moments.

I read your poem “Earth Debt” out loud on the phone to my partner last night. You wrote, there are no human rights, but there are human obligations. I was thinking about debt and about reframing what debt means, what labor means and work means, especially in relation to the earth. I think about the work that is required of us in order to be in right relation to the earth, to grow food, to steward land. It requires structure, and it requires discipline. Fred Moten talks about debt and indebtedness, saying that we are all indebted to one another all the time—in fact that we should strive to be in a state of debt towards one another.

LLC: That’s what my friend Sara says. My friend Sara Selevitch, one of my favorite writers. She’s writing something about debt. She told me about the 800-page book by David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years, that traces the significance of debt across different cultures and contexts. It talks about how it’s good and socially useful to have a debt to one another. Sara was describing recently, you know, before cutting ties with someone when you pay everything back or whatever, at the end of a friendship or a break up, here’s your things, evening the score… keeping things open keeps the possibility of the relationship open. It’s like, you pay for my coffee, so next week it’s on me. This sort of belonging and intimacy of owing to each other.

I was invited to write this poem for Street Views, which is a mutual aid newspaper that was started by UCLA students and organizers in 2023. Some of us were invited to be a part of this Master’s in Urban Planning class that brought together its students and housed and unhoused organizers, who are all working on spatial justice. A lot of my classmates were people who were currently or formerly unhoused. A lot of them lived in the encampment at Echo Park Lake before the mass eviction and sweep. In that class we talked a lot about space and home and what it means to be a neighbor. I wrote the poem based on what I learned from my classmates. One of those things is the joys and autonomy of living outside… why that’s how some people live and how there are all of these traps and controls that come with being housed. For people that are living on the street who are getting offered shelters each night, there are often curfews and carceral conditions and loneliness and overdoses and punishments, which is why so many people turn those offers down… The poem is weaving some of that together.

MS: My last question was about the bodies of water in your childhood dream. I often think about bodies of water and their movements. I was curious, who the bodies of water are, if they’re tangible, or if they were just in your dreams?

LLC: That’s the question. I love bodies of water too. My family migrated up from Sinaloa to the LA area, and then a lot of other family continued up the coast to Watsonville. Now my Mom’s in the Bay, but we’re all along the Pacific Ocean. Being near the ocean is years and probably generations deep. And I have a lot of dreams. I value my dream world a lot, there’s a lot of meaning and significance to them, and ways they affect my material life too. I dream a lot about bodies of water, and I always assume that they are made up because they’re recurring. There’s one that is this huge, huge lake in between two mountains, and there’s another one that’s really foggy and and, there’s all of these gnarled trees along the shore, but it’s all gray in a way that’s beautiful. And I was telling my friend Shabina once, about you know those made-up bodies of water that you dream about. And she said, “Well, some people say that those are all real, you know.” And I cried.

MS: The dream world is also real.

LLC: Exactly. I love the idea that I have these bodies of water that I share, oceans and lakes, but that I might have my own too. ♦