Feature image by Roger Fenton. [Reclining Odalisque], 1858. Salted paper print. From the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Rubel Collection, Purchase, Lila Acheson Wallace, Anonymous, Joyce and Robert Menschel, Jennifer and Joseph Duke, and Ann Tenenbaum and Thomas H. Lee Gifts, 1997.

Listen:

Once it’s made. Yesterday
three loquats lay on the ground,
golden as empire.

Lately your voice is tinny, gramophone
cotillion and quadrille. I’m afraid
to turn the record. Dirt blows over

terracotta, up my feet and legs,
devils, devils. More loquats above,
glass tesserae crowning—

somebody. No loss of local boys,
bisque-mild, faces that can outempty
anything, how they drop hard,

cadavers. Nor the reason, unnameable
but as droves toward a feeding purpose.
Trough, crow. When the Spanish

arrived the ocean lay like an
odalisque, and the ribbon-neck sunset.
They did what I wish I could.

Left names. Have I heard correctly.
You were without remove. Oh it’s
a gold rush of expectations this place.

Esther Lin
Brazilian born Esther Lin is an undocumented poet and the author of Cold Thief Place (Alice James Books, 2025) and The Ghost Wife (Poetry Society of America, 2018), and co-editor of Here to Stay: Poetry and Prose from the Undocumented Diaspora (HarperCollins, 2024). Lin is a critic at large for Poetry Northwest, and co-organize the Undocupoets, which promotes the work of undocumented poets and raises consciousness about the structural barriers that they face in the literary community. She was a Writing Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center, Provincetown, a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and her work has been supported by Cité Internationale,, the Poetry Society of America, and Poets House, among other organizations. She won a Pushcart Prize in 2024, and was featured in Best New Poets 2022.