Iliana Rocha’s work has been featured in Best New Poets 2014, as well as the Nation, RHINO, Blackbird, and West Branch. Karankawa (Pittsburgh, 2015), her debut collection, won the 2014 AWP Donald Hall Prize for Poetry. She is an assistant professor of creative writing at the University of Central Oklahoma.
ten mexicans are dead, left to suffocate in a trailer, discovered after the driver asked someone for a drink of water.
When he traveled, he did so without mercy, in a body that was not a body but canvas painted with his handprints.
Crooked red fingers of stretchmark on her hips, dough Isabel kneads back into hips, magnolias in her hair, blossoming hips
Walking into the smell of old wounds, something about my grandmother’s
bedroom always kept me from there—the perfume
once animal golden now rancid & dark as whiskey. Lace-
medallioned, doilies marking time turned to loss
At the spot where the girl lay, I see the refineries. Their stencils are blurred on the horizon, making their machinery less intricate, & therefore, holy.
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