An urban introvert in end-stage capitalism,
she sometimes forgot she was part of a community
until something terrible happened to it.

The once-glimpsed friend-of-friends
who died of cancer, young.

A quake in the earth under her adoptive city
when she wasn’t there to see her neighbors register the rubble
and weep with them.

Inconceivable fires in the inconceivable green
all visible, inconceivably, from space.

Each time, the reminder of this intimacy came at first
like a shiver––

like a diagnosis
or like music.

The filaments flickered.

Living alone for the first time, she’d walk to the market
and make promises in her head––

I will not think I am better than I am
I will ache and fear because there is hurt and fear to be felt
I will buy my apples from this old woman for the rest
of my life, or at least for the rest of hers

––because she had so rarely placed
her body on the street among thousands of other bodies,
had never driven a truck into the wire fence of a detention facility,
had not sworn off the machines that carried her periodically back
to her family, soaring through the actual, perishable
air.

Robin Myers is a Mexico City-based poet and translator. Recent translations include Another Life by Daniel Lipara (Eulalia Books), The Science of Departures by Adalber Salas Hernández (Kenning Editions), and The Animal Days by Keila Vall de la Ville (Katakana Editores). Her poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in the Denver Quarterly, the Yale Review, the North American Review, and elsewhere. She writes a monthly column on translation for Palette Poetry.