Anna Flores is a poet and writer from Nogales, Arizona. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Arizona State University where she currently teaches English & Composition. Her awards and honors include a 2021 Swarthout Award in Writing and a 2021 Center for Imagination in the Borderlands Creative Research Fellowship. Her work has been published in Red Tree Review, The Nation and Columbia Journal. Her poem “Palmas últimas/Kasayeo’s Washingtonia Filifera” came out in Huizache 10 and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

Answers have been edited for length and clarity.

We met during the Anaphora Writing residency and Natalie Diaz was our instructor. I don’t know if you remember but we did an exercise that focused on finding our personal lexicon. What words/images/themes do you consider to be part of your personal lexicon?

I’m trying to become more versed in the ways different bordered people are oppressed and what that entails. So there’s a lot of security and safety and surveillance language that I’m interested in. One of the poems in Huizache is an attempt to pull away from that lexicon but still look at those things. There’s a lot of theory I’ve been trying to understand. I’m interested in what the people that I consider to be guides, writers like June Jordan, what they were reading. I’m reading George Jackson and other political prisoners and adding that to my inventory of language. I’m always thinking about land-based language. Language feels very futile right now, because of the material conditions that we’re feeling [regarding the Israeli – Palestinian conflict]. Because it feels so futile, I really want to hold on to whatever articulations are grounding me here.

What I’ve always enjoyed about your work is that you reach for new ways to say things, especially about the struggles of bordered people and the border. 

There’s an anxiety about just saying that same thing over and over again. I’ve accepted that it’s probably something I’m going to try and articulate forever, for my whole life. I’m trying to find ways, find new questions, and new ways to understand what is happening at the border. Although it’s such a longstanding violence, it has so many different iterations and it feels like a responsibility not necessarily to the world, but to myself, to face that violence and to try and articulate it over and over again.

You mentioned that your lexicon was influenced by what you’re reading. What have you been reading? 

I’ve been reading a lot of June Jordan. I read a lot of Wendy Trevino. Wendy writes poems in a way that we converse and that’s interesting to me. I was reading Blood In My Eye by George Jackson and that has been inspiring and brings me to the question of “What are the stakes of language?” I’ve been reading Edward Said. I’m holding the way he thought about the word exile. I’m also reading “Decolonization is not a metaphor” and that, along with Said’s writing, is opening new worlds of thought for me and I have so many more questions now, which is a much more generative place to be rather than like “I have to tell people something,” which was what I thought when I first started writing.

I do feel that resonates with me, when you say “I have something to say,” and then as a poet, you interrogate that feeling and grow more in that practice over time. I see that in your poems that we published, especially in “Palmas últimas.” Tell me about writing that poem, what was your writing process

When I first saw the Washingtonia Filifera at Kasayeo Mountain which is in Yuma, I was struck by how beautiful they were, how surreal it was for this family of essentially palm trees to be living together in a canyon, miles off the ground, in a shady little crevice. As I was researching them more, it made me think about home, about exile, about survival and this specific landscape as one that is often deemed inhospitable. Just imagining this palm tree climbing up and finding shade and living, surviving in volcanic rock, it makes me think of who I love and who is with me and how we will both remain here in this land no matter how condemned it is and together, always together.

You’re talking about this togetherness between nature and human beings. The ending of the poem “Palmas últimas” felt hopeful. Do you feel like that’s an element of your work, or was that just this poem specifically? 

No, I think that’s definitely a lesson from a lot of indigenous thinkers that are more like the apocalypse is a solution that only white supremacy can come to. Rethinking that apocalypse of the end of the world as just a way in which we continue, somehow, someway. Maybe not like anti-apocalyptic because I feel the world carries a lot of opportunity, but I am very much wanting to challenge the diagnosis of specifically this land, and imagine that we are able to rebuild something better.

What’s your writing process like?

I’ve gone through a lot of phases and a lot of teachers and a lot of mentors. I’m definitely influenced by whoever the hell is teaching the workshop, I’m always like “Oh, they’ve figured it out.” I always really enjoy my writing, which is beautiful, and I’m grateful for that, but it can be stunting in a way, to think it’s perfect. And so I think editing has become this second magical process. Prayer has a lot to do with this. I just grew up in prayer and it definitely influences the cadence and the rhythm that I try to step into. I let myself be influenced, I let myself be moved. I was lucky enough to study under Alberto Rios, a fellow Nogalense, he taught a grip of editing strategies. I’m talking step by step instructions on how to read the poem that you’ve written.

I know that in 2018 you self-published your first book. Are you working towards a second collection, and if so, would you consider self-publishing again? 

I published Pocha Theory in 2018 and that experience really influences everything and how I move and think about the poetry world and the industry. At the time, my brother was making his way across the desert for the third time and so, it was funny to have written a book that felt final and then have that happening. I had so much community support. I didn’t feel like I was doing something special or out of the ordinary, it was the tradition of the region, of the people I was around. Thinking of my brother, I realized [the book] was not an artifact of my overcoming, which I thought that was what it could be. It was an artifact of continuous violence. And yes, I am working on a manuscript called “La danza de la palma,” and I have been pitching it. While I had a lot of community support, I had no institutional support. But I’m pitching this book, más o menos, one foot in, one foot out. Knowing the possibility of not relying on any industry, I know that I could collaborate with folks locally, we could do it, there’s no doubt in my mind. I think now it’s a matter of what the book wants and how it can be carried. I’m okay with waiting, five, ten years, it really all depends.

Well, I look forward to reading more, always.

Yes, thank you, Vanessa, thank you.