Photo by Wandering khan

If you received the letters I wrote

you’ll know that time has placed
a void inside my body,
my house,
my words.

I’ll leave a note in the weeds.

I know nothing about the others
along the route of solitary birds,
birds and ivy
and breaking

on a trunk of trembling wind.

But speaking for those who won’t return
we want you to know
this won’t be the final battle

we wage in your name.

Andrea Cote Botero

Andrea Cote is the author of three poetry collections, En las Praderas del fin del mundo; La Ruina que nombro; Puerto Calcinado; and two selected works, Chinatown a toda hora and Desierto Rumor. She has also published three books of prose: A Nude Photographer: A Biography of Tina Modotti; Blanca Varela or Writing from Solitude; and edited a Colombian women’s poets anthology, Pájaros de Sombra, winner of the International Latino Book Award. Cote has received The National Prize of Poetry, Struga International Poetry Prize, and the XXIV Premio Casa de América de Poesía Americana (2024), among others. She has translated into Spanish the poets Gibran Kahlil Gibran, Tracy K. Smith, and Jericho Brown. Cote is a Professor of Creative Writing at the Bilingual M.F.A. at UTEP.

Craig Epplin

Craig Epplin has published reviews, essays, and creative nonfiction in Public Books, Words Without Borders, Music & Literature, The Bosphorus Review of Books, and Guernica, as well as translations of short works by José Martí, César Aira, and Enrique Vila-Matas. He is Associate Professor of Latin American literature at Portland State University, and is the author of the monograph Late Book Culture in Argentina (Bloomsbury).