[Associate Editor, Elizabeth Soto: Quintanilla takes us on a journey of loss. The kind of loss that you can’t see coming as a child, but that finds you when you least expect it, hundreds of miles away from the backyard where you were raised. This is the kind of hurt that we can’t avoid, that we can’t prepare for. The way stretchmarks hurt when you thinkabout a time before they existed. This is how Octavio’s poem aches in my chest.]

Tonight, I expect the only star in the sky to be

so bright I’ll forget all I know about sorrow,

how it feels like sandpaper against skin,

how it looks like the old woman my mother has become.

I was still a boy when I watched my father plant a fig tree

in the backyard, me not knowing much about the fruit it promised,

but knowing enough about the river running through

my father’s quiet as he dug a hole to make his offering.

Ever since, I’ve been running in the opposite direction

of hope, try to logic my way out of God’s existence,

and find myself tunneling through time till I get close

enough to see an exit and then time begins again, but this time

without the people I have loved. A day will come

when my body will no longer open like a suitcase

to take myself on a journey where I’ll dream

of never being found. All this to say,

the fig tree is no longer where my father blessed its seed,

the backyard no longer ours.