In My Terrible Years

what surprised you about the composition of this poem?

I tend to begin a poem with an image or a memory—something I think I know how to describe in perfect detail. With “In My Terrible Years,” it was the memory of throwing stones at the windows of an abandoned school when I lived in Ciudad Juárez as a child. I wanted to linger in that image for a while. To describe the shape of the glass and the dull orange stain of sunlight on the shattered shards. But as I wrote, the poem immediately began to shift. Its rhythm picked up. Lines started breaking more rapidly into short bursts of language. Suddenly, the poem moved faster, and that speed changed everything. Language pushed me toward association and conjured unexpected images outside my lived experiences. This has become common practice in my writing. Letting the sound and the shape of the poem guide me toward a pathway of surprise. It often leads to discoveries I didn’t know I needed to make. This way, then, the opening memory becomes a doorway. I allow myself to reach beyond its threshold for something that feels truer than the facts.