Natalie Scenters-Zapico is a fronteriza from El Paso, Texas. Her first collection, The Verging Cities (2015), won the PEN America/Joyce Osterweil Award, GLCA’s New Writers Award, NACCS Foco Book Prize, and Utah Book Award. Lima :: Limón, her second collection, was a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Prize and the International Griffin Poetry Prize. Her third collection, My Perfect Cognate, will be published by Copper Canyon Press in September, 2025. Winner of Yale University’s Windham Campbell Prize (2021), Scenters-Zapico has held a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation (2018), a Lannan Literary Fellowship (2017), and a CantoMundo Fellowship (2015). Her poems have appeared in a wide range of anthologies and literary magazines, including The Paris Review, Best American Poetry 2015, POETRY, Tin House, Kenyon Review, Colorado Review, and more. She teaches in the undergraduate and MFA creative writing programs at the University of South Florida, where she won a USF 2022 Faculty Outstanding Research Achievement Award and a 2023-2024 McKnight Junior Faculty Fellowship.
Judges’ Citation
There is a driving, deliberate, righteous indignation to Lima :: Limón, a force that that will unsettle many readers though it is tempered with a mature and forgiving undersong of empathy and love.
There is a driving, deliberate, righteous indignation to Lima :: Limón, a force that that will unsettle many readers though it is tempered with a mature and forgiving undersong of empathy and love. Natalie Scenters-Zapico is a fronteriza, a frontier dweller, a woman shaped by the contending cultures of Mexico and the USA. Her unflinching gaze is turned on machismo and marianismo, and the quotidian reality of community in crisis, in an elegant poetry that speaks through masks both sacred and profane. The shadow of femicide is never far, but the poet finds a redemptive magic in the voices of the mutilated, in the traditions of ancestors, in the salvific powers of language, in poems pushed to the very edge of what can be said.
Selected poems
by Natalie Scenters-Zapico
Life is short & I tell this to mis hijas.
Life is short & I show them how to talk
to police without opening the door, how
to leave the social security number blank
on the exam, I tell this to mis hijas.
This world tells them I hate you every day
& I don’t keep this from mis hijas
because of the bus driver who kicks them out
onto the street for fare evasion. Because I love
mis hijas, I keep them from men who’d knock
their heads together just to hear the chime.
Life is short & the world is terrible. I know
no kind strangers in this country who aren’t
sisters a desert away & I don’t keep this
from mis hijas. It’s not my job to sell
them the world, but to keep them safe
in case I get deported. Our first
landlord said with a bucket of bleach
the mold would come right off. He shook
mis hijas, said they had good bones
for hard work. Mi’jas, could we make this place
beautiful? l tried to make this place beautiful.
Copyright © 2019 by Natalie Scenters-Zapico, Lima :: Limón, Copper Canyon Press
Buen Esqueleto
I want to be the lemons in the bowl
on the cover of the magazine. I want
to be round, to be yellow, to be pulled
from branches. I want to be wax, to be
white with pith, to be bright, to be zested
in the corners of a table. I want you
to say my name like the word: lemon.
Say it like the word: limón. Undress me
in strands of rind. I want my saliva to be
citrus. I want to corrode my husband’s
wedding ring. I want to be a lemon
with my equator marked in black ink –
small dashes to show my shape: pitted & convex.
Copyright © 2019 by Natalie Scenters-Zapico, Lima :: Limón, Copper Canyon Press
Lima Limón :: Infancia
A sheet cake soaked in milk & left suspended. She had no decorations, so she placed a sugar bowl on top. She placed her man at the head of the cake & told him to close his eyes & relax: Lean back, mi rey, you deserve comfort at the head of my cake. She wanted to capture the cake before it was consumed, so she called her brother-in-law & asked him to stand behind the cake for good balance. She jumped on top of the cake, folded her legs like Minnie Mouse & told everyone to be cool, this cake was going to be in a movie. She was going to call it À la Mode & this was to be the opening scene. But there’s no ice cream, her man said. No, my body is the ice cream, she said & pursed her lips for the camera until her mouth became a dark wound. Her man, who adored her again for a minute, said: You’re so dumb, clean up this kitchen already, da asco. She waited for the hot water to run & poured a cap full of bleach in the sink. She cried: All my movies are no movies. All my movies are not mine.
Copyright © 2019 by Natalie Scenters-Zapico, Lima :: Limón, Copper Canyon Press