Can you tell us a bit about this poem and how it came to be?

The poem imagines a world where the Salvadoran Civil War never occurred and my family was never forced to migrate. But more broadly, I think the poem is a love letter to the diaspora. This poem explores what it means to have an origin that comes from a painful history, but ultimately turns to the joy in community, to the beauty of coming together; it represents abundance through food and so much more.

I wrote the poem after spending a summer in El Salvador performing poems but also learning more about the history, politics, and traumatic aftermath of the Civil War. I wanted to reimagine my family’s experiences into a world that centers their joy and well-being—not just their trauma.

How would you recommend that people approach reading this poem—or, indeed, poetry in general?

I want to speak on this in my experience as an educator. Even when I’m teaching poetry classes, often I will have students say, “But I don’t get it!” I think that we need to push past the idea that you are supposed to get something specific. Because it’s not a problem that you need to solve, right? A poem is something that you’re experiencing. I would encourage folks to sit with a line, sit with a particular phrase, anything that resonates with you—that is going to be the best entry point for poetry. Sometimes I’ll even tell my students, “Hey, like 50% of this book went over my head, and I’ve studied poetry and written poetry for many years. And that’s okay. I still thought this was a wonderful book. I still wanted to teach it and share it with you.”

How do you see the art of poetry functioning in our current environment? How should we think about it?

I think poetry offers us—and I think the creative arts more broadly offer us—a really important opportunity to imagine and build better worlds for ourselves and for each other. I’m very inspired by the ways that we can use the arts to tell stories about migration, to tell stories about the ways that we love, the ways that we come together, the ways that we celebrate, the ways that we grieve. All of it.

Poetry as a genre lends itself to imagining. I think one of the most important things that poetry teaches me is awareness and slowness. I observe the world around me and slow down with those details.

In terms of the poem “In Another Life,” when I was conducting research in El Salvador, there were a lot of really painful histories about the Civil War that I was learning. I really wanted to visit El Mozote, which is the site of one of the bloodiest massacres in modern Latin American history [in December of 1981]. I was thinking about how the name of the town, Mozote, had become synonymous with massacre. So I wrote down in the Notes app on my phone, What would it look like to create a world where Mozote does not mean massacre?

Obviously, Mozote doesn’t literally mean massacre, but because of its historical associations, I started to imagine what would have to happen or unhappen to make that statement true. That became this poem.

You wrote this poem some years ago. Do you read it or think about it differently now in the context of what’s happening to immigrant communities in the US?

The militarized attack on migrants, especially in my home of Los Angeles, has been absolutely horrific and endlessly devastating to experience. My heart breaks for the families torn apart, the livelihoods destroyed, the children orphaned by the violence of deportation, the city I love turned battleground. Despite all this terror, I am moved by the ways that Angelenos have continued organizing, resisting, and fighting for the liberated future that we believe is possible. Poetry, for me, has always functioned as a place of possibility: where words can breathe life into alternate worlds. Imagining is the first step to creating. “In Another Life” envisions a world without histories of settler colonial violence, US imperialism, war, hunger, etc., and instead dreams toward freedom, joy, love, and abundance. These kinds of visions for a better world are what sustain movements, what bring hope in the cruelest of times, because they are what remind us of exactly what we are fighting for—exactly what is indeed possible.