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Lauren Camp: The goal was to go everywhere, county to county across the state, reaching many small, rural communities. I started in Alamogordo, in the south-central part of New Mexico, reading poems and answering questions, then watching with delight as everyone in the vast crowd wrote in response to a prompt I gave.
Read the profile of New Mexico State Poet Laureate Manuel González, here. Albuquerque, this is healing, reclamation. We sanctify the soil, We are more than crime statistics. We are San Jose sunrises, Barelas barrio alchemy, Central Avenue gospel painting hope in bold strokes of dawn.
Read the poem, Ritual. Vessel. Volcano. Vision. The coffee shop was unusually packed with regulars for 7 p.m. on a Wednesday. There was a mix of folks, some looking like they’d been there for a while, entire book bags of belongings sprawled across tables.
LeaflessSunlight strikes the leafless aspen branches,strikes the white picket fence, and as Ilook at highlighted edges, my eyes sting.Tufted grass stalks sway in the flooding rays,and, in the poinsettia of this hour, I needsome darkness to bloom: in this spacea snow leopard leaps among rocks,the rosettes of its fur a moving landscape;its hunger scents the air.
Read six selected Sze poems published in this issue here. At age twenty-one, Arthur Sze hitchhiked from El Paso to Santa Fe in a single day. Knowing no one, and accompanied only by his boundless curiosity, he arrived seeking a place to build a life as a poet.
The poem wants to drink water from the stream running through land that hasn’t been in the family since the gringos came but will settle for lead-free pipes and no
BY CMARIE FUHRMAN — CMarie Fuhrman is the author of Camped Beneath the Dam: Poems and co-editor of Cascadia: Art, Ecology, and Poetry, and Native Voices: Indigenous Poetry, Craft, and Conversations.
![Silhouetted mountains at dusk with a gradient orange to blue sky and small lights scattered in the valley below. [gen-ai]](https://elpalacio.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/iStock-544683456-400x225.jpg)
In a collaboration with the New Mexico State Library’s Poetry Center, inaugural New Mexico Poet Laureate Levi Romero and Albuquerque Poet Laureate Emerita Michelle Otero have edited the New Mexico Poetry Anthology 2023, published by the Museum of New Mexico Press.
![A full moon shines in a starry night sky above silhouetted mountains with a faint orange glow on the horizon. [gen-ai]](https://elpalacio.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/iStock-162515751-400x225.jpg)
Ana Castillo What Is Your Writing Process? With mop in one hand,cocktail in the other,at 9:00 a.m. or night,flies swatted,roach corpses swept.Lola Beltrán belts “Mi ranchito”through the house speakersfrom room to room.I hum off key.Mares fed, dogs let out,sun beating on the flat roof,moon rising behind a cloud—verses take form.
![Three open books appear to float in midair along a leafy, pergola-covered pathway with sunlight filtering through the foliage. [gen-ai]](https://elpalacio.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/iStock_000007235219Medium-400x225.jpg)
Curated by Darry Lorenzo Wellington The poems that I have curated for El Palacio reflect a maxim that branded me with a lasting mark. My instructor at a residency program at the Atlantic Center for the Arts, Thomas Sayers Ellis, smilingly explained: “The poem isn’t on the page.” He iterated the pronouncement whenever he encountered a poem that fell flat and lifeless.
