Subjunctive

One incorrect definition for conjuncture:
anecdotes, seamed and charred into process

                                     To reshape our form, towards another incomplete
                                     Hope changes the outcome of language

Each season, a chance: to send money home, to evade death
It’s easier if you promise the boss you believe

                                     A chapter titled: How the Dead Helped to Organize
                                     the Living. A chapter titled: El Clamor Por La Tierra

In the daydream he’s backlit and describing a highway
Sin embargo, love doesn’t verify its description

                                     The people closest to the land were killed first
                                     This will not be news. Look how I found you in spite of
                                     English in spite of Reagan and the Catholic Church, despite
                                     wilted certainty

Our material is Third, only desire is inevitable—of what’s next after
This could be it, the animal; this could be a misguided advertisement
for new desires: more, more, more, more, more, more, more, more, more, more, more, more, more, more,

                                     If we are waiting in line for ourselves
                                     what else could we

Copyright © 2023 by Zaina Alsous. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on June 27, 2023, by the Academy of American Poets. 

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“I wrote this poem after spending a few weeks studying Spanish at a language school in Guatemala that has historically practiced solidarity with Indigenous movements for self-determination, both within the nation and beyond it. It is a meditation on how we/language are/is shaped by the unfinished, the yet-to-be-realized, and the always-could-be.”
—Zaina Alsous