2025 Frontier OPEN Winner: “Poem Wedged into the Brittlebush or Poem that Eats What Happened” by Anna Flores
In “Poem Wedged into the Brittlebush or Poem that Eats What Happened,” Anna Flores captures the unrelenting pain and absence that continue to haunt a family after loss. The poem reveals the slow deterioration of heart and mind as a mother and father come undone, their lives unraveling around what is missing. What remains are objects—a yellow ribbon, a long braid, a silver chain, a brown map—that serve as fragments of a once-whole life, each tethered inextricably to the lost brother. Flores’s craft lies in how she uses language to embody grief: the family “[lives] inside missing him,” and as the poem progresses, complete sentences and memories collapse into single images. Through this fragmentation, Flores invites readers to inhabit the poem’s grief themselves, to feel how loss reduces language, memory, and even identity to what can barely be held onto.
Experience her poem below.
Poem Wedged into the Brittlebush or Poem that Eats What Happened
by Anna Flores
Anna Flores is a border-dwelling poet and writer born in Nogales, Arizona, and raised in West Phoenix. Her work has appeared in The Nation, Red Tree Review, and Huizache Magazine. She currently teaches at a community college and lives between border cities, often writing from the immediate shadow of the wall.
