A note about the poem “13 Ways of Nepantla” from Fernando Trujillo for the Michigan Quarterly Review's Summer 2024 issue: I had been reading Wallace Stevens’s Collected Poems, and I kept finding myself back at “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” which was in his first collection. I was struck by the austerity of the poem, in contrast to other works by Stevens. And I kept returning to the second canto, “I was of three minds, / Like a tree / In which there are three blackbirds.” I thought of myself and my community, how so many of us are of two, or even three minds, within the same tree, so to speak. We have our indigenous mind, our Caucasian mind, and our mestizo mind, cutting across both México and the US for me and many in my community. This also, linguistically, applies to my poetic lineage; Neruda en español inspired me as much as Whitman in English as a teenager, Dickinson as much as Lorca. This all contributed to my mindset when I started writing “13 Ways.” Of course my poem is not as tightly structured or imagistic as Stevens’. I’m writing more from sound than image. I’m also attempting to place myself, my experiences, and my family at the center of a poetic lineage, hence all the grabbing from other poets. All-in-all, what I’m trying to do is imagine myself in the song of “América America,” and more than just imagining, writing a place for myself in it.