As Trump Targets Borders, a Poet Finds Their Language

Poets have drawn their entire works on the resilience of life in the borderlands: consider the theories of Chicana American literature developed in Gloria Anzaldúa’s novel. Borderlands/La Frontera; English and Spanish in the poetry of Eduardo C. Corral; Or the translations, mistranslations, misunderstandings, and valid objections that drive Natalie Centers-Zapico’s new poems. It is difficult for American readers – and American poets – to see the southwestern United States, or northwestern Mexico, without them.

To those names we can now add Sarita Murugan. The poet grew up in a military family and now lives outside Atlanta, where she leads workshops and helps immigrant aid groups, but her writing here concerns, instead, the border region of the southwestern United States (and northern Mexico). Her prose poems, her brief lyrical descriptions, her momentary memories and her quotations (from natural history, from magazines, from radical political writers) in her first book, alternative nature, Speaking assertively and beautifully to life around boundaries. Mostly they are human lives: Mexican, Mexican American, black, military, veteran, indigenous, traveler, sedentary. Sometimes, instead, it is plants and animals—such as the saguaro cactus, the cholla plant, and the endangered “hooded bobwhite quail”—that thrive in these contested spaces. If only the poems implied that black, indigenous, and Mexican Americans could flourish peacefully there as well.

A US Border Patrol vehicle near the US-Mexico border wall in Sunland Park, New Mexico, on December 9, 2021.Patrick T. Fallon/AFP via Getty Images

She writes: “Between one desert/and another, I recognize the edges, parting and clear.” The sky may look clear enough, but the land is not: it is criss-crossed by law enforcement, roads, walls, waste, “the story of the temple. And fodder box springs,” like a sprawling bed where no one can sleep. (The book asks: How can we sleep while other humans die in the desert? How does anyone sleep?)

The poems speak to current controversies over immigration, customs and border protection, and mask policing. A generation or two ago, “the wall was a fence or a joke that we used to get home faster,” as Mexican American families crossed the border easily, without worry. Now the same wall can kill.

Morgan’s book, completed in 2024, is unable to respond to the events of 2025. Instead, she anticipates them, explaining the suffering she witnessed—and alleviating it, leaving life-saving water to migrants as a member of the No More Deaths field team. It succinctly places these events amid other violence, and other recovery processes, in the history of southern Arizona, New Mexico, and the American military. “Do I regret my time in the army, my mother wants to know.” The real Morgan, outside of poems, also worked with Veterans for Peace and For Face: Veterans Against War.

Cholla cactus in the Sonoran Desert near Ajo, Arizona, on March 28, 2006.David McNew/Getty Images

Since its subject transcends geographical boundaries, the book transcends the boundaries of genre, memoir, poems, poetry, prose, nature writing, and journalism. “All species are ripe for aerial annihilation,” like weeds or human victims to satellite eyes: Morgan prefers species survival, so she can do her work among them.

She presents her military family, and her adult life in southern Arizona as a writer, hiker, protester, and immigration activist, through prose that shines and coheres in blocks or single sentences but does not—on first reading—cohere as stories. Short prose passages, paragraphs, separate sentences, and the occasional verse invite us to piece them together instead, to make sense of events, characters, situations, and worldviews as more frontier areas are brought into focus through memories, camping trips, natural history, and physical evidence of strength, compassion, survival, death, and cruelty. Like him:

None of the signs say thank you for your left arm, your hearing, your lymphatic health, or your land.
I want to thank you for being alive,
And thank you, unfortunately, when it’s not what you want it to be,
Thanks down to the lines that wrinkle your deeply fascinated head…

And like this:

Officers were watching all along our street. Our legs
It was barely covered.
Our streets were closed and opened to frame the process of intimate respect.

Or like this:

Consequences are never out of season. Or within our reach. On tap. unoccupied. Not emotionally attached.
Sleepless against the wet earth. A thick-eyed animal looking forward with a rough chest.

In these sentences, hanging across the pages like scraps, are human bodies (ours and others’), arroyos, hills, conversations we remember, immigrants, and thoughts about how to help them all try to work out for themselves at least half the freedom.

Alternative nature It is a close relative of one of the greatest prose poems composed in a similar way, that of C. D. Wright One big one (2007). What Wright did for the prisons and Louisiana, Morgan did for the frontier and the Southwest. Wright looked outward and inward, at the prison and at the limits—linguistic and emotional—imposed on the lives of prisoners. Her work spanned numbers and initials. Instead, Morgan “felt all the borders on which neighboring vertebrates feed.”

Every lizard that darts up an arroyo tree, every cactus that throws a seed into the wind, bears witness to the imposed nature of legal and social boundaries, and to the creation of new kinds of people, words, and laws among them.

Morgan’s borders evoke beauty, but also injustice, the “desolation of stitches.” Her short paragraphs and detached phrases speak to poetic verses that refuse to become, to lines on maps that nature cannot respect, and to the sentences they form instead—grammatical, legal, or temporal. “Every sentence has a unique ending.” “What do you do with a nigger in the desert,” one who seems out of place?

Morgan asks: What would we do with ourselves if we felt that our places were always in the middle, subject to objections, stuck between stations? How do we “get beyond the imagination of power” whose lights and walls, literally or symbolically, make some of us flee?

Morgan’s prose poems draw not only on what she saw and heard, but also on radical social critics: Mary Pat Brady on Mexican and Mexican American child labor; Ruth Wilson Gilmore on (to use the terms she would use) abolishing the cancerous condition; Painter, writer and poet Etel Adnan. All three address what Morgan calls “the line that appears where accountability does not.” However, the poems never become predictable in their language. Nor do its pages—written, she says, about “the weave between floodplains and officer lore”—devolve into dry or repetitive explanations; Morgan leaves this kind of work to historians, rhetoricians, and analysts.

Instead, it offers aspects, snapshots, and similarities: between a quail and a migrant; Between her wandering life and her other life; Among Americans, Mexicans, members of indigenous nations, and figures from mythology, including Coyote’s Daughter, Demeter’s Wolf, and Persephone’s Wolf. Many indigenous tales depict Coyote as an immortal trickster, playfully ignoring boundaries, undermining the efforts of other actors, and committing acts of sabotage. The word “coyote” also means someone who is paid to transport migrants across the border, which is against the law. Several families (possibly the Morgans) straddle the border. In Morgan’s poems, the edges of nations become like borders between life and death, between the fields of childhood and adulthood in the underworld, which Persephone crosses twice a year, as her kidnapper, her husband Hades, and her grieving mother Demeter agreed.

A family talks with relatives across the US-Mexico border fence in Tijuana, Mexico, on July 2, 2016.Guillermo Arias/AFP via Getty Images

If migrators, residents, and other enforcers view Morgan as Demeter, Persephone, and Hades, she looks herself somewhat like Odysseus, the intelligent, far-flung traveler beloved by many poets, who wanted nothing more than to find and dominate his homeland. The book even veers from Tucson, Albuquerque, and Agua Prieta—her usual home—to the Mediterranean in Odysseus:

Say you’re from Canada, I was told in Cyprus where they took my passport.
But I didn’t think then, as I put my hand almost over the mermaid’s mouth,
I embodied tradition, and I was tiptoeing through the cast-gray sea…

Morgan’s frontiers are areas of fertility, but they are also scars, as if the continent had cut through its veins: “Consecrated geography mars every wrist.” By enforcing its borders, the United States engages in legendary acts of self-harm, as well as exposing migrants to dehydration, kidnapping, and death amid “barricaded roads” and “stained glass of half-barred windows.”

Her book amounts not to an argument backed by verified evidence—we shouldn’t look to the poets—but to a tour, a demonstration, a way (like all poems) to show what it means to be her: a woman who knows how to cross and inhabit a beautiful, dry, violent, contested borderland that is emblematic of so many other borderlands—life and death, wet drought, hope-terrifying, activism-exhausted, and the United States-elsewhere. Each term depends on the other. Things grow between them. Some know how to live there.