Borderwound

Patrycja Humienik

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Great Polish poets were born in cities that no longer belong to Poland. Now Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine. My people claim the imagined place. Guarded by the Gates of Dawn, the Cross of Saint Euphrosyne, the golden lion with its coat of arms, the crowned eagle. The idea of nation is a record full of ______. Anzaldúa wrote, the U.S.-Mexican border es una herida abierta. Scrawled in black marker on a wall in Bulgaria, EVERY BORDER IS A WOUND. On how many walls, in how many languages is it written? Wounds unlatch on every continent. A map only approximates. Each time Poland was erased, the Wisła river remained. Can a river unwound? There’s a Polish saying that quiet waters tear the banks. Cicha woda coming for my outlines. On a strip of polluted beach beneath the Poniatowski Bridge, faces warmed by the golden hour, a painter tells me, breathless, that Warszawa was magnificent before the war. The past disrupts the current. It happens all the time. We climb to see the river at dusk, a different scale, tilting: past-future, future-past.

Feature Date

Series

Selected By

Share This Poem

Print This Poem

Patrycja Humienik is the author of We Contain Landscapes (Tin House, 2025). An editor and teaching artist, Patrycja has developed writing and movement workshops for the Henry Art Gallery, Arts+Literature Laboratory, The Seventh Wave, Northwest Film Forum, and in prisons. Her work can be found in The New Yorker, Gulf Coast, Poetry Northwest, Poetry Society of America, The Slowdown show, and elsewhere.

BOOKSHOP

PUBLISHER

We Contain Landscapes
Tin House
  • Featured book

“Wondrous. . . . We Contain Landscapes introduces a gorgeous, determined, and vibrant new voice to American poetry.”—Aria Aber, author of Good Girl

To whom do we belong, and at what cost? Patrycja Humienik’s debut poetry collection, We Contain Landscapes, is haunted by questions of desire, borders, and the illusion of national belonging. Bringing music and rich sensory detail to the page, these poems attend to the inextricable link between our bodies and the land. Over six ruminative and lush sections, they survey place and memory, both intergenerationally and through emotional bonds with other immigrant daughters.

Weaving in letters, innovative forms, and meditations on devotion, sexuality, and self-deceit, We Contain Landscapes introduces a speaker who “will not turn away from the ache of this world.” For every reader who also harbors a voracious longing to encounter infinite landscapes and ways of being, this incisive collection dreams toward a more expansive idea of kinship—of becoming beloved to one another and ourselves.

Poetry Daily Depends on You

With your support, we make reading the best contemporary poetry a treasured daily experience. Consider a contribution today.

DONATE NOW