Dora Prieto: California Poets Part 11, Five Poems

Dora Prieto (photo by Grady Mitchell)

October 20th, 2026

California Poets: Part XI

Dora Prieto

Two Poems

What does thread conduct?

a mother crushes a scorpion

a daughter picks the chicken clean

a christian single falls in love

a campesino sees guadalupe

a sister cries at her quinceañera

a forest fire displaces thousands

a billionaire takes a joy ride

a family fragments across the planet

a millennial downloads the Calm app

an alien fucks with the supreme court

Jaime Maussan says, “te lo dije”

a lake returns to drown a city

a single mom works three jobs

a red giant consumes its planets

a monster finds her nemesis

a man cries alone on a beach at night

a letter arrives but is never opened

a forgotten app breaks and decays

a doctor gives a terminal diagnosis

a cosmos fades in the expanding dark

one tug and the whole weave changes

what if we unraveled it all as we went?

I hold just a small handful, in the infinite skein:

cable, fibril, subject, verb, cilium, rod—

what does thread conduct?

Blood Tejido - I was always too soft for gender, let alone Florida

Jen Alvarez told me I had the perfect body and that her boyfriend loved her despite her flaws. Days later, she slammed her books on my desk after home economics. “Meet me, bitch,” she said, and I did—out behind the windowless wall after school. We circled, and she swooped behind me, her arm closing in around my neck. Then she tore out my earring, from the ear she’d pierced a few weeks earlier.

The crowd jeered, soaring at the sight of blood—girl fights, as you know, are rare and precious.

Jen and I were friends again by the following week. I remember the peace of her body as she slept next to mine, while I picked the scab on my ear, a few drops of blood spilling onto her pillow.

Five years later, she would join the army and post photos in camo, smiling in the sun, looking so healthy and strong. I could never figure out where she was.

A friend once told me that the original phrase was: "The blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb." That blood spilled in battle outweighed blood inherited. I loved this reversal, this hidden truth. Later, I learned it wasn’t true. I wonder whether the story spread because empires need soldiers to seem sacred. Blood keeps changing its story.

When skin is torn, blood flows, platelets bind, and fibrin weaves a mesh. The clot hardens, shielding the wound. Beneath, new tissue forms, and the scab falls away.

Author Bio:

Dora Prieto is a Mexican and Canadian poet and translator, a newcomer to Oakland, and a 2025–27 Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford. Her debut poetry collection, Blood Tejido, is forthcoming from House of Anansi in spring 2027. She is the co-translator of JAWS [tiburón] by Xitlalitl Rodríguez Mendoza (Cardboard House Press, 2026) and has held residencies at Hedgebrook and Banff Centre. Her work has appeared in Best New Poets 2025, Catapult, and Maisonneuve, and she won the 2025 Bronwen Wallace Award for poetry. A co-founder of El Mashup Collective, her practice moves across poetry, translation, textiles, and visual forms.