BORDER BETWEEN PRAYER AND PROMISE
Endnotes
In the eye of the storm. End of the school year, starting summer of resistance, and the churn of emotions under a gloomy June. This week’s strange poem, “Border Between Prayer and Promise,” is speaking to the political reality that is both absurd and concrete: the result of lines crossed and blight.
I’m tired, burnt out at the end of the school year, and nervous about what I’ll read next in the news. Luckily, writing offers a momentary escape—and so I’ll share with you a few pieces I made in the last few weeks that culminated in the poem above.
I just finished a 10 week class on “Borderlands Praxis,” which centered around the act of creating art in a border-adjacent city. For the final project of the course, I collaborated with my peers to create a collection of writing titled Both, And: Bordering / Unbordering. Here’s what I wrote for my “process note” at the beginning of my section.
“Border Between Prayer and Promise” was written to fit into this context and the collaborative collection, and in it I am trying to investigate the experimental and radical nature of “in-between places.” The push of San Diego and the pull of Tijuana are at play in this poem. So too the regressive American conservatism and the often hypocritical liberal progressivism that surround conversations of borders, migrations, and death.
It’s an odd poem—weird words and multiple collisions (language, sense, perspective). That’s where the image collage comes in: it is a layering of (1) excerpts of Valeria Luiselli’s Tell Me How It Ends (Coffee House Press, 2017), (2) a page from the horrid Project 2025 blueprint for American fascism, (3) the “Migrant’s Prayer,” and (4) Google Maps depiction of the border between San Diego and Tijuana. I used the visual line of the border in the Google Maps image to create an arbitrary “border” between these texts; then, I used my favorite surrealist word game to swap words around in order to evoke the senseless nature of internationally policed borders between nation states. After editing and a few sense-making changes, the final poem is meant to speak to the question “when does arrival end?”
As the son of an immigrant and a proponent of free love, I offer these words to you so that we might reconsider the lines we treat as real and the ideas we treat as sensible. At the end of two years of studying “The Fine Art of Writing,” I see weirdness, in-betweenness, mixtures, experiments, and abstraction as tools for redefining our political reality and our relationships with each other. Whether we draw lines with ink and paper, or with concrete and barbed wire—there will always be the space between.
And lines break.
Fuck ICE,
Ricky