The Blueprint of the Land

by Édgar J. Ulloa Luján

There is no river
but only sand
sand and no river
in the borderlands
There is no river
but only sand
sand and no river
it’s a fantasyland

There is no river
but only sand
sand and no river
in my motherland
There is no river
but only sand
sand and no river
like in Babylon

There is no river
but only sand
sand and no river
but only drugs, guns
and contraband
There is no river
but only sand
sand and no river
but only burritos, narcos
running cheap errands

There is no river
but only sand
sand and no river
but only
a militarized land
There is no river
but only sand
sand and no river
but only maquiladoras;
supply and demand

There is no river
but only sand
sand and no river
but only women
buried in the sand.

About the author…

Édgar J. Ulloa Luján is a performance artist and poet from Ciudad Juárez, México. He founded a pioneer multimedia poetry blog (mijuaritos.wordpress.com) when his hometown was the most dangerous city in the world. His performances negotiate border politics, cultural memory, trauma, immigration, and violence in addition to instigating audience and public participation. Ulloa received his BA in Literature at UTEP and his MFA in Creative Writing at New York University. He is pursuing a Ph.D. in Spanish Literature at Georgetown University. He has performed in PEN World Voices Festival–PEN America and México Now Festival in NYC and The Poetry Festival Expandible in México City. He participated in the 31st Ljubljana Biennial of Graphic Arts in Slovenia and SALTS in Switzerland at Work Off Paper exhibit, an art exhibition about how text function. Ulloa’s work was included by CONACULTA in the first national anthology of visual poetry in México. He was the 2016 Emerge-Surface-Be Poetry Fellow from the Poetry Project in NYC. He has participated virtually with Colombia and Spain reading poems online for audiences. Ulloa is currently coursing his second year in Georgetown University’s Spanish Literature Ph.D. program.