Brandel France de Bravo is the author of the poetry collections Provenance and Mother, Loose and the editor of Mexican Poetry Today: 20/20 Voices. Her poems have appeared in Best American Poetry 2024, 32 Poems, Barrow Street, Conduit, Diode, Salamander, Southern Humanities Review, and elsewhere. Her newest poetry collection, Locomotive Cathedral (Backwaters Press, 2025) was published in March.

With wit and vulnerability, Brandel France de Bravo explores resilience in the face of climate change and a global pandemic, race, and the concept of a self, all while celebrating the power of breath as “baptism on repeat.” Whether her inspiration is twelfth-century Buddhist mind-training slogans or the one-footed crow who visits her daily, France de Bravo mines the tension between the human desire for permanence and control, and life’s fluid, ungraspable nature. Poem by poem, essay by essay, she builds a temple to the perpetual motion of transformation, the wondrous churn of change and exchange that defines companionship, marriage, and ceding our place on Earth: “not dying, but molting.”
 
 

Resilience II

Feast on bitter milkweed, nourishment
and nursery. Store its poison like revenge
against the frog, bird, lizard, mouse
who would prey on your tiger stripes. And,
when the days grow shorter, join a caravan
bound for Mexico that inflames no one.
Something there is that doesn’t love

a wall. Leave Canuck-cold, bootstraps, self-made,
go-it-alone. Be unexceptional as you fly
en masse, no air traffic control, three thousand
miles to a gentler fall, Day of the Dead,
marigolds, coxcomb, and candles, your one
and only visit to Mexico a heralded return:
all hail the monarchs. Huddle in oyamel furs

on steep slopes at night, breaking branches
with your featherweight, and once the sun
has finally warmed you, give the royal wave
of a million orange gloves. You’ll bear heirs
in spring, pass the crown, but until then,
live from your larder in diapause. Our feast,
bitter as milkweed, never slows, and heat’s

the poison we store. It’s causing oyamel to die,
at least the ones not logged. How do you rescue
a winter palace in ruins? Plant the forest higher
where it’s cooler, say the scientists, like a house
on stilts. Deferred Action for Climate Ailments?
Dreamers, we hunt and hunt for higher ground,
seeding uphill. Where fire travels fastest.

Fill the pool knowing full well it’s not the end
of empty, that those who drained it—better no one
swim than together—planted oaks where water
was, a rustling shelter for fear. Cut them down,
knowing roots, acorns. Break ground, work around
clotted concrete, listen to the sound of shovel
against gravel. What does bone-weary
even mean? Be the cartilage that was never meant to last.