Ana María Caballero
2 poems
reprinted for the first time from the collection Material by Ana María Caballero with permission of Trio House Press.
A Proposed Debrief of Operation Enduring Freedom
After David Trinidad
I remember feeling old enough to understand. I remember not understanding.
I remember looking up the names of places, placing them on a map. I remember buying The Kite
Runner. I remember reading the book, believing I understood. I remember being afraid to speak about
it because speaking made it real and such horror couldn’t be real. I remember it was
gradual. First Iraq, then this.
I remember the word justified.
I remember learning about drones for the first time. I remember an election, black-marked index
fingers held up for international newspapers. I remember viral pictures of prisoners. I remember
the different body sizes of the fallen.
I remember the cut of not understanding.
I remember not leaving my house for days. I remember terror as distant, terror as abstract, terror
as perception. I remember time passing, how I started to feel old.
I remember still not understanding.
I remember peace. Or is it not listening I remember? I remember thinking it was over. Is it
ignorance I remember?
I remember the beginning.
The Words of It
After a chapter of James and the Giant Peach,
I tell my boy it’s time to read on our own.
One page in, he stops: I want to read from yours.
As I search for a kid-friendly bit, he articulates alarm:
You wrote in your book! You ruined it.
You’re allowed to mark sections you like. It’s called annotating.
Here, read what’s beside the star:
“I decide to make my class read creation myths.
The idea is to go back
to the beginning. When God is a father,
he is said to be elsewhere.
When God is a mother, she is said to be
everywhere.”
The poetry in that
is really good.
What do you mean, “the poetry”?
The words of it.
I echo his phrase, The words of it,
trying hard to retain—and so keep—
all the mnemonics of this,
so I can go back
to the beginning
and ask the poetry how it already
marked my son.
Bio
Ana María Caballero is an award-winning literary artist whose work explores how biology delimits societal and cultural rites, ripping the veil off romanticized motherhood and questioning notions that package sacrifice as a virtue. She's the recipient of an Academy of American Poets Prize, the Beverly International Prize, Colombia’s José Manuel Arango National Poetry Prize, the Steel Toe Books Poetry Prize, a Future Art Writers Award and a Sevens Foundation Grant. In 2024, she became the first living poet to sell a poem at Sotheby’s and the first artist ever to receive a triple Lumen finalist nomination. Her twice Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net-nominated work has been published extensively and exhibited as fine art at museums and leading international venues, such as the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, HEK Basel, the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, the Thyssen Museum in Málaga, the Wroclaw Contemporary Museum, Museo de Arte Miguel Urrutia in Bogotá, Paris Photo Fair, Art Dubai, Poetry Society of America, New World Center and Times Square. A foundational voice in digital poetics, Caballero is a graduate of Harvard University and the author of six books. She also co-founded digital poetry gallery theVERSEverse and is a contributing writer for Forbes, covering Web3 culture.