We take shelter in dead cows andlift ourselves with hooks to keep out of sight.At check points, our dangling bodieshold legs to chest, as instructed, to avoid detention.All language snuffed outby the blue perch of meat. It’s a miraculousthing to be wrapped in it.After we pass, relief rustlesthe epidermis—enough to warm usfor some time.Who trained our bodies for this?Poverty is violence.We know the look of deadthings behind pinned drapes and how to makehistory in one day. We bent at the kneesto kiss our children’s faces.
Bone Harp
Silvia Bonilla
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“Bone Harp” from City of Eves © 2026 by Siliva Bonilla.
Reprinted by permission of the University of Arizona Press.
Silvia Bonilla holds an MFA from the New School. She is the author of the chapbook An Animal Startled by the Mechanism of Life. Her work has been featured in Blackbird, Green Mountains Review, and Cream City Review. She has received support from the Kenyon Review Writer’s Workshop, Sewanee Writer’s Conference, Napa Valley Conference, Community of Writers, the Saltonstall Foundation, and Juniper Institute.
In City of Eves, Silvia Bonilla evokes the lives and longing of three young women who suspect the wider world is a ship on the verge of departure—and who are determined not to be stranded on shore.
Sonia and her two best friends grow up on the urban coast of Ecuador, sharing cigarettes, school uniforms, and a determination to overcome their circumstances even if the price to pay is exile. Full of fantasies and curiosity, the friends navigate hunger at home, absent parents, and religious pressures as they help each other through the pleasures and traumas of adolescence. As their desire for something greater changes from dreams into actions, they pursue escape routes that hover between choice and compulsion: forced marriages, early widowhood, and a death-haunted migration to the United States. Even in the throes of escape, the constraints of their reality always lie waiting.
Subtle and unsparing, Bonilla’s lyrical poems capture the wild inner horizons and vivid embodiment of youth as it shades into the reflective poignance of maturity marked by disappointment, compromise, and loss. Despite this, it is memories of deep friendship, bonded through shared understanding and aspiration, that lingers. Looking back on her life, Sonia recalls the courage and vitality of girls determined to shape their own futures: “We lifted Coca-Cola bottles to the / opened granadilla of our mouths.”
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