ADELA CROSSES THE LINE

Suzanne Edison

My body is a carpetbag of ruins
My body a country, carries a field

My body fields the hope of owning itself
My body earthquakes, tsunamis, tornadoes

I dream a country
I quake blooming 

                       ≈≈≈

On brinks, rivers, crossings, walking, deserts, luck—

if they didn’t notice me   if they thought I was like 

if defiant     in difference       or not      if not dead

inside the loss      if language       if more than one  

if a word    a hand-outstretched       if not        out

of hands

                       ≈≈≈

I imagine coffee trees rake 
the sky above fields
terraced in Guatemala

the third time Adela says, 
point, crest, tip, en español, 
and, manos pequeños, 

the smallest hands picked berries
meaning, her children harvested too.

She traced an edge, lip, el borde
of migration from one grief 
to another—and I imagined 

a chasm, crevasse, 
un-crossable because I hadn’t 

seen the gangs, guns, 
extortionists emerge at night, 
perforate the dark, make
their punto, an abismo, understandable 
in any language.  

Suzanne Edison’s book, Since the House Is Burning, was published in 2022 by MoonPath Press. Her chapbooks, The Body Lives Its Undoing and The Moth Eaten World were published in 2018 and 2014 respectively. Her poetry can be found in The Missouri Review, SWWIM EveryDay, Solstice Literary Magazine, MER, RockPaperPoem as a contest finalist, Whale Road Review, Lily Poetry Review, JAMA, and elsewhere. She has been awarded grants from Artist Trust, Seattle City Artists, and 4Culture of King County, Seattle and is a Hedgebrook alumna. She lives in Seattle and is an avid gardener and cloud-watcher.