Poetry · 2024–2025

FIRST PLACE IN POETRY · UTEP BILINGUAL CREATIVE WRITING AWARDS

University of Texas at El Paso

Herbario is a poetry collection recognized with First Place in Poetry at the 2024 UTEP Bilingual Creative Writing Awards and later published in Rio Grande Review.

Herbario approaches memory through images of preservation, transformation, and the natural world. The poems move between personal experience, objects, bodies, and landscape, treating memory as something that can be collected and observed, but never fully preserved unchanged.

The collection explores the fragile relationship between what remains and what is lost, allowing images to function as traces of experience rather than fixed records of the past.

Los ligustros

Profundidades
cuerpos tendidos

sístole boca
nada en el sueño

chocan de frente sus 
bandoneones

toman la siesta
no estoy

durmiendo.

En contrapunto sus
esperanzas

roncan chicharras flor
de manguera

siento las pieles en sus
perfumes

sudando, beben babeando
el fuego.

Si están dormidos

la tarde 
pasa, resuello insiste

por los aleros 
que queman nubes 

charcos, jardines leves
frutales

como si en celo 
de las ventanas que arden

de trigo 

todo incendiaran sin ser
deseo

“Los ligustros,” from Herbario, First Place in Poetry, 2024.

Emerging Voices, UTEP Bilingual Creative Writing Awards. Fotografías de Julio Barrera (@malnumero)

Recognition

First Place in Poetry
2024 UTEP Bilingual Creative Writing Awards

Publication

Rio Grande Review
2025