​I am a fourth-generation resident of a small barrio, called La Calavera (The Skull), right on the U.S.-Mexico border. It is the last remaining neighborhood of El Paso’s historic Smeltertown, a residential community of more than 2,500 Mexican immigrants who built their lives on ASARCO land (American Smelting and Refining Company). Growing up in La Calavera provided a secluded oasis for creativity and imagination. My love for reading and writing poetry started here, cradled in the womb of the desert. The Union Pacific railroad tracks are a few hundred yards west of my home and Smelter cemetery, where generations of smelter workers and their families are buried, is immediately to the east of it. Growing up by the shadow of the smelter smokestacks, my brother and I would play in the black dirt of the cemetery, and ride our bikes to the abandoned factories along the river and neighboring hills full of mesquite and barrel cacti. We pretended we were astronauts in this vast desert terrain. We had so much space and freedom to be blind to the outside world. I grieve for the landscape of my childhood because my 6-year-old daughter Sonnet, of Ghanaian and Mexican-American ancestry, cannot play outside with the same kind of carefree abandon that I did. The river next to my house is now barricaded by a rust-colored steel wall surrounded by razor wire. National guardsmen and border patrol agents constantly drive in front of my home in pursuit of fleeing immigrants. I love my home but it's a war zone. ​My poetry and collage art explores the mixed feelings I have about living on the U.S.–Mexico border. Despite my family’s roots in El Paso, I’ve never felt completely connected to this city. I only speak a few words of Spanish. I know almost nothing of my indigenous (Kickapoo) ancestry. My poetry delves into personal and family wounds, traumas, and disconnections. It explores my longing to become close again to my estranged brother; it expresses unflattering truths about motherhood, postpartum depression, and living with chronic pain.