Sara Borjas

HEART LIKE A WINDOW, MOUTH LIKE A CLIFF Noemi Press

I am the scrape of the lowrider as it exits the driveway, bothering the neighbors.

—from “Ars Poetica”

HOW IT BEGAN: In my heart I wanted to love better. We are a colonized people putting ourselves together for hundreds of years. Much of our lives, ideas, values, and traditions are survival tactics. I wanted to see my parents as individuals but also through this lens and love them wholly. I didn’t want my heartbreak, or theirs, to be for nothing. So in each poem I asked: How am I making myself and my family more simple and responsible for our lives than we actually are? And I never really stopped answering, even through all the revisions and drafts, and even now. Many of these poems are me puzzling together how I show love and what and who I think deserves it and why. When I began working with Noemi, one of the first things my editor, Carmen Giménez Smith, told me was that I had a manuscript

but not a book yet. This stands out as the beginning for me. This is when I felt for real compelled, capable, and honestly challenged to write this very specific collection.

INSPIRATION: Oldiez. Fresno. The reliability of crop rows and how you can see all the way to the end no matter what. Books like Whereas by Layli Long Soldier, Crush by Richard Siken, Blood by Shane McCrae, and MyOther Tongue by Rosa Alcalá; Anne Sexton; Rumi; “punk poetics,” as Juan Felipe Herrera says; the word no out of any woman of color’s mouth; Lifetime movies; Real Housewives; really, any drama where the protagonists are women; oranges from my dad’s tree and zucchinis from his garden; my mom’s sense of humor; all shit-talkers everywhere; my sister’s ruthless sentimentality and her writing—she’s an amazing writer but stays low-key; and watching and helping my friends work on their books at the same time.

WRITER’S BLOCK REMEDY: I try to break the habit by being okay with not writing. I watch TV and films, talk to my friends and family, read, watch shows about outer space, and go down rabbit holes looking up phenomena. I cook. And all that, to me, is a making.

ADVICE: Write toward honesty, then, really write toward honesty. Stop lying.

AGE: 33. RESIDENCE: Leimert Park, Los Angeles. But I’m from Fresno, California. JOB: I teach creative writing at UC Riverside and moonlight as a bartender. TIME

SPENT WRITING THE BOOK: The oldest poems in the book are eight years old but are wildly different. TIME

SPENT FINDING A HOME FOR IT: About three or four

years.