To plan a route to pick up my child from school, I check iceout.org for a map of recent ICE sightings. They’ve multiplied in recent days, with the Federal occupation surging to 3,000 agents in Minneapolis, five times the size of the city’s police department. Earlier in the morning, . . .

If war
is a film
it’s not necessarily horror.
In my case

I was born in a small city in Guatemala, whose cobblestone streets and colorful colonial architecture have long housed a healthy community of American ex-pats. Growing up there, Spanish and English came to me like twins: chronologically, one was handed to me before the other . . .

Begging to differ, we have not

An ounce of poetry, no libraries, no bindings,

No sooth-singers, no melting iambs.

I left without saying goodbye to him, my escape quicker and quieter than I’d imagined. And now, as I walk down my street, everything has taken on a peculiar quality: the road narrower than I thought, the stench of trash rising and mingling with a trace of ginger, the lights at the corner . . .

In late summer 2005, I disembarked in the city of Mostar after a three- or four-hour bus ride from Dubrovnik, the vaunted pearl of the Adriatic in neighboring Croatia. The wars that had dismantled Yugoslavia . . .