Spotlight series #120 : Carlos A. Pittella
Curated by Canadian writer, editor and publisher rob mclennan, the “spotlight” series appears the first Monday of every month.
author statement
I often find myself meditating on borders as liquid fault lines. Liquids, of course, don’t respect borders. Water finds porousness. Humans try to respect & make their borders respected. Still, sweat proves our vulnerability. There are the borders of the self, of privacy, of the body — thin edges our senses cross & the world keeps challenging, whether pleasantly or dangerously. But I’m also thinking of the imaginary borders we materialize with walls, papers, checkpoints, often to great cost to our bodies, privacies, & selves.
As someone who has immigrated more than once, I’ve stumbled upon border after border & into their astonishing ambivalence — how these bureaucratic inventions often lack porousness but also allow us to reinvent ourselves. I come to these borders as a Latinx poet but don’t romanticize Portuguese/Spanish/French as more legitimate spaces than English; these are all colonial syntaxes, with complex stories of erasure & subversion. I’ve accumulated accents with which I ask: Do I even have a “native” language if my first voice is a colonial byproduct?
I’m interested in language loss & the spaces such loss opens. If borders haunt me, they are also transition spaces where life surprises: mangroves, where salt/fresh waters meet or the atmosphere begins, the tree line, cultural gaps between East/West, accents of North/South, rituals of becoming/letting go… I believe in poetry as a bridge-building practice that allows us to walk through, breathingly, as less fragmented beings.
TWO POEMS
X
after Ae Hee Lee
Every time they print an X all over my face
not even pixelated but a fairly good face
considering we’ve endured a 36+hour journey
from some side of an ocean to
some other side of an ocean that is
if you can look beyond the X
My love & our lovey are both Xless
but because I’ve been Xed
we three must move to a different
line the bottom of it & wait with all those
whose crowdface stuffed into a cloud
has been pierced by a crossroads
How should one cross the last steps from
behind the yellow line to the officer’s
plexiglass with that rectangle missing
for a voice to carry hopefully?
How to modulate a raspy accent
to sound the least menacing possible?
Does one go with joke or extra-formal
deference all the way thru? Depending
on whom you get the pickup line can drop
all of you into an endless spool never to be
fished out of sea the coast looking further
& further away it’s my turn now Hello
Carlos A. Pittella (he/him) is haunted by borders & bureaucracies but tries to haunt them back through poetry. His worked has appeared in the chapbooks footnotes after Lorca (above/ground press, 2024) & propersitions (Cactus Press, 2025), as well as in the manifesto Dante’s Bureau (Anstruther Press, 2026). Born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, you may find him in Sikóóhkotoki/Lethbridge & at www.carlosapittella.com.
