Don’t make it difficult to return. Don’t make it difficult to teleport. 
Time travel is the target of any imagination & my imagination                        
is better than my memory. Shoot the arrow back. Shoot the arrow
back to when I had no seatbelts. No rails. Back to the riverbank.  

To walk backwards is to watch your whole life flashback 
like the percussion sounds of a spinning record scratched. 
Walk it back. To scratch a record is to spin it to the percussion 
sounds of an echo your whole life in reels lived backwards. 

It takes a bit of moonwalk. It takes one foot in front of the other 
& the other stands on toes. Now push back. How about that? 
No gravity. No graves. All the way back to harmonic calibrations
way back. The water back to its faucet. The cap back to its gun. 

Otherwise, I’m lost. Here, the corn. Hear a flock of birds 
in reverse. Back to an egg. I was shelled. I was warm. 

—

William Archila is the winner of the 2023 Philip Levine Prize for Poetry. His poems have been featured in The Academy of American Poets Poem-A-Day and have been published in Poetry Magazine, Prairie Schooner, American Poetry Review, AGNI, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Missouri Review, Tin House, among others. He has also been featured in Spotlight on Hispanic Writers at the Library of Congress, Washington DC. His first book The Art of Exile (Bilingual Press, 2009) won the International Latino Book Award in 2010. His second book, The Gravedigger’s Archaeology (Red Hen Press), won the 2013 Letras Latinas/Red Hen Poetry Prize and also was a finalist for the International Latino Book Award in 2016.