By Michelle Lizet Flores. Winner of the 2019 Get Like Us Chapbook prize, chosen by Andrea Abi-Karam.

“Memoria or an ‘attempt to fly without wings’ stitches ancestral memory, immigration narratives, intergenerational trauma together in a prosodic-lyric web whose spine is the premature death of the narrator's mother. Amidst the darkness of grief and struggle, the faultlines that the loss of a parent cracks open confer a great heaviness. Our inability to stave off death leaves us to hang, along with our bathing suits, dresses, jackets, buttons, in the space between survival and death.” - Andrea Abi-Karam