At the Threshold of What Hasn’t Been Destroyed
Three stark poems from the National Book Award-longlisted Texan Octavio Quintanilla, filled with longing, displacement, and the fragile beauty of human connection.
A TREE BY THE RIVER
A tree by the river
and its leaves fall
on the water
and my lover tells me
with a sigh
she misses her country
and she opens my hand
and sees
the mountains of the village
where she first fell in love
and her sigh is a flame
and her eyes are two nights
and the river carries
my verses
downstream.
CONFESSION
Now I confess
my tongue is made of doubt
as my lover anchors
her head
to my chest
to tell me
children are dying
and citizens
are persecuted
and the prisons flower
with human heads
and I caress her hair
thinking
this must be
the way
she loves me
in her mother
tongue.
SLEEPLESS TONIGHT
Sleepless tonight
I see my lover's left eye
open like a cage
though she doesn't know
this is how she dreams
of one day sitting
under an olive tree
and seeing
between the branches
an airplane
dragging its white tail
a sign
that the war is over
and that her mother
will be waiting
at the threshold
of what hasn't been
destroyed.
Octavio Quintanilla is the author of the poetry collections If I Go Missing (Slough Press, 2014), The Book ofWounded Sparrows (Texas Review Press, 2024), which was longlisted for the National Book Award, and Las Horas Imposibles/The Impossible Hours, winner of the 2024 Ambroggio Prize of the Academy of American Poets (University of Arizona Press). Octavio is the founder and director of the literature & arts festival,VersoFrontera, publisher of Alabrava Press, and former Poet Laureate of San Antonio, Texas. His Frontextos (visual poems) have been published and exhibited widely, and he teaches literature and creative writing at Our Lady of the Lake University. He was recently inducted into the Texas Institute of Letters.