Isabel Zapatais a Mexico City–born writer and editor. She is the author of the poetry books Ventanas adentro (Ediciones Urdimbre, 2002), Las noches son así (Broken English, 2018), and Una ballena es un país (Almadía, 2019) as well as the bilingual essay collection Alberca vacía / Empty Pool (Argonáutica, 2019, trans. Robin Myers). Recent poems have appeared in English translation in Waxwing, The Common, Rio Grande Review, and are forthcoming in Words Without Borders.
Photo by Alex Pasarelu / Unsplash
A new mother in Mexico contemplates the future—for her daughter, for all of us.
On February 1, 2020, as I was giving birth in Mexico City, fifty-four people…