Sara Borjas

cantfindit

SARA BORJAS is a Xicanx pocha, is from the americas before it was stolen and its people were colonized, and is a Fresno poet. Her debut collection of poetry, Heart Like a Window, Mouth Like a Cliff was published by Noemi Press in 2019 and won a 2020 American Book Award. Sara was named one of Poets & Writers 2019 Debut Poets, is a 2017 CantoMundo Fellow, and the recipient of the 2014 Blue Mesa Poetry Prize. Her work can be found in Ploughshares, The Rumpus, Poem-a-Day by The Academy of American Poets, Alta and The Offing, amongst others. She teaches innovative undergraduates at UC Riverside, believes that all Black lives matter and will resist white supremacy until Black liberation is realized, lives in Los Angeles, and stays rooted in Fresno. She digs oldiez, outer space, aromatics, and tiny prints is about decentering whiteness in literature, creative writing, and daily life. Source

A Heart Can Be Broken Only Once, Like A Window

 I miss the kind of love they sing about in oldiez songs

but I don't ask for it anymore.  My palms are turned down

 

against gusts taking themselves away.  I listen to wild parrots

while I run between sycamores in the park.  I walk around

 

uncomfortable in the jeans and wonder if the holes

are something I've made.  I think about some things

 

so I don't think about other things: pizza, poetry, Neosporin.  

I eat my fried eggs out of a bowl shaped like a man's hands.  

 

The thin, gold rings on his fingers are still mine.  I have myself 

to remind me of love, and that's all.  I tie tiny triangles of glass

 

to string that I wear around my neck, and some say it's pretty.

When my mother doesn't recognize the jewelry adorning me,

 

hoping, she asks if it's new.  And even though I am Mexican,

feel deeply & joke dark, God still owes me a drink for every time

 

the woman I should be has died.  I no longer mean it when 

I say please.  Sometimes words belong between certain people

 

And neither one is you.  Sometimes people are just lines in a song.

Today, I feel like telling jokes instead of pretending

 

to write pretty music and I am angry with the word should.

I think about words so I don't think about loss, or all the feathers

 

left on my porch.  I want to open the front door and see

a clean bird waiting for me on the doormat like I'm Snow White

 

even if it has rusted forks for wings.  I once heard

that the world breaks everyone.  That afterwards,

 

many are stronger at the broken places.  I wish

a whole woman would wake up inside of me.

Published:

2017

Length:

Regular

Literary Movements:

Contemporary

Anthology Years:

Themes:

Love & Relationships

Music & Sports

Womanhood

Literary Devices:

After Poems

A poem where the form, theme, subject, style, or line(s) is inspired by the work another poet.

Allusion

an expression designed to call something to mind without mentioning it explicitly; an indirect or passing reference

Anaphora

a figure of speech in which words repeat at the beginning of successive clauses, phrases, or sentences

Couplets

two lines of verse, usually in the same meter and joined by rhyme, that form a unit

Simile

a comparison between two unlike things using the words “like” or “as”