Mistake House Magazine: Images of water recur throughout How to Kill a Goat and Other Monsters, often in dream sequences. Early on, these images feel surreal and resistant to containment, as in “The Boy Who Lives in Dreams,” where the speaker tries to “nail water to the wall,” only for it to slip away. But as the collection unfolds, water takes on more specific and historical weight, especially in poems like “13 Reasons Why Apá Fears Water,” where it becomes the Rio Grande in Apá’s dreams, carrying the memory of his brother’s drowning during their attempt to cross into the United States. By the time we reach “Meditations on Grief,” where a therapist suggests that “Grief can manifest in dreams,” that earlier image of water begins to read differently, as if the speaker were trying to nail grief itself to the wall, to contain it.
You’ve spoken about the influence of Gloria E. Anzaldúa on your work, and we’re thinking here of her idea in Borderlands/La Frontera that “images are more direct, more immediate than words, and closer to the unconscious.” What is it about dream imagery that makes it so essential to expressing what you’ve called a “language of grief” in your poems? Did you consciously shape water into a metaphor for grief as you were writing, or did that connection emerge more intuitively through the realm of the unconscious?
Saúl Hernández: Since I was a child, I have been a vivid dreamer. In my dreams, the images are striking but there is no sound. I initially wanted to translate my dreams, I’d ask myself questions like, What sound would this dream make? Why is water being nailed? How come I keep having this same dream? etc. I didn’t know it but at the time when I was writing these poems, I was putting in the images instead of what I thought was the sound of these dreams. In a workshop session, my colleagues asked where these images were coming from, to which I responded, What images? It was then when I realized what I was unconsciously doing. Sometimes I’m so blinded and zoomed into my own work, and when I’ve been revising or staring at the same piece for some time it can get difficult to see what the poem wants to be or say. Ultimately, when it was brought to my attention that water is such a symbolic theme and metaphor throughout my work, I was already three fourths done with the collection. The final poems I wrote for this collection were more intently done to fit into what the collection is trying to convey to my audience of how grief is forever transforming.
MH: Dreaming is a part of your writing practice. You’ve said that when you wake up from a dream, you write it down, sometimes as a sentence, sometimes as a short paragraph trying to capture the dream as fully as you can. We’re curious about that initial act of transcription, and what happens to it afterward. How much of the language from that first attempt to record the dream ends up in a poem, and how much of it gets reshaped, revised, or left behind? If putting dreams into language is a kind of translation from image to text, what do you feel is gained or lost in that process? When you revise a poem that begins in a dream, how do you decide whether to preserve the dream’s illogic or clarify it for the reader? Lastly, are there specific poems in How to Kill a Goat and Other Monsters where you deliberately resisted “making sense” of a dream image?
SH: I am very open to the act of transformation while writing. I’ve learned through the process of transcribing my dreams and through the process of revision, I have to be open to how my work shifts and lands. I’d say a quarter or a bit more of my dreams are featured in my writing. I use dreams more so as a portal to enter writing. Dreams give me the imagination, permission, and push to manipulate language. The biggest job when doing revisions is making sure there is still clarity in the poem, whether it be through a metaphor or an image. A poem can still be illogical and make sense if a poetry element is unconsciously guiding the reader through the poem. For instance, in my poem “Meditation of Grief,” perhaps at first reading the poem one might think how is this poem moving through one scene to the next and how is the ending image of the son and father drowning while laughing logical? In the poem, I’m able to weave in the metaphor of the ballon bursting which resembles how one can feel overwhelmed with grief. Because I establish this message early on, in every scene the reader encounters it they have an understanding, and when the reader gets to the end of the poem it makes sense why the father and son stay in the car while water goes in—they both are so overwhelmed by grief, the only thing they can do is laugh while drowning. This symbolizing they have accepted defeat from their own feelings. I always look for threads (elements of poetry) in poems which weave throughout the stanzas or forms and see how the weaving is working with the illogical.
MH: Returning to images of water, we’d like to ask about the Rio Grande, which recurs throughout your poems as both a real and symbolic border between the United States and Mexico. In a poem like “13 Reasons Why Apá Fears Water,” the river exists in dreams, memory, and history as a site of trauma, where a father’s brother drowned while trying to reach Texas. The poem shows how memory and dreams can travel across boundaries, not only between past and present, but between places and people. You’ve said that you “turn to poetry to explore the borders” you continue to live in—of identity, time, and geography. How does poetry allow you to move across those borders in ways that other forms of writing might not?
SH: Poetry has definitely given me the power to revisit memories, Mexico, dreams, and identity by realizing poetry is not bound to linear time, logic, or even to a single perspective. In an essay or narrative, there is a need to explain for clarity purposes. In contrast, with poetry, a contradiction or issue can be left unresolved or better yet turned into an illogical image. When speaking of literal and figurative borders, I think about how the function of a literal border is not only to separate but also connect. Poetry allows for connections the way a border does and through form it can also separate language or understanding (the way a physical border does).
MH: In news reporting about the Rio Grande border between Texas and Mexico, the river often appears as data or headline. For example, an article from the Global Investigative Journalism Network notes that “at least 1,107 people drowned while crossing the Rio Grande between 2017–2023” (García 2025). In contrast, in your poems, you often address the river directly, as in “The Rio Grande Speaks” or “Question for the Rio Grande,” where the speaker asks, “How many more times will your name come out in headlines until you’ve had enough?” What does personifying the Rio Grande make possible for you as a poet? And how does that choice shape the way readers are asked to encounter the lives and deaths connected to it, and to immigration policy in the US?
SH: When I was creating this collection, I wanted every character in this collection to be as well rounded as possible. I was lucky to have been able to workshop some of these poems through Tin House Summer Workshop. My workshop leader —the incomparable Patricia Smith— asked me during our 1-1 if I had thought what the Rio Grande might say. She pushed me to write from its perspective. After many drafts, and once I included it in my collection, I realized it gave my collection additional weight of how my reader might interact with not only the speaker, the speaker’s family, and those who have lost loved ones to it, but with the Rio Grande itself. I also think about how the Rio Grande is perceived by everyone as this monstrous entity, when in reality it’s not its fault it was selected by mankind to serve as part of a border. If anything, we, ourselves have personified the Rio Grande first. What I hope I did with my poem, “The Rio Grande Speaks,” is give the river a layer which is not often given to it—compassion.
MH: In an interview with The Rumpus, you mentioned that you didn’t initially intend to write about your family or lineage. Yet many of your poems are written in a first-person voice that feels deeply autobiographical, even as they move through dreams and imagined spaces. How do you navigate the boundaries between autobiography and invention, or between lived experience and dream? How has writing about deeply personal (and often traumatic) experiences, both your own and your family’s, shaped your understanding of them? Does turning those experiences into poetry change how you remember your family, or how you relate to them over time?
SH: When I write about family and trauma, there’s an ethical and emotional balance. Not everything I write about belongs to me alone. I have to create a way in which my family and my personal material isn’t exposed in a purely literal way. By creating distance through image, metaphor, repletion, form, etc. it can protect both me and the people being written about, while still honoring the weight of those experiences. Anaïs Nin said, “We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.” I think about this quote as over time turning memory into poetry can reshape how those memories are held. However, writing doesn’t just record the past—it revisits and reinterprets it. Certain details become sharper, others blur, and sometimes entirely new meanings emerge. In this process, family members can shift too: they become not just figures in memory, but presences in language, shaped by how they’re remembered, imagined, and addressed. This doesn’t mean poetry replaces reality, but it does create another layer of relationship to it. I might come to understand a moment or a person differently—not because the facts have changed, but because I’ve allowed myself to see them from multiple angles at once. In this way, poetry becomes a vehicle of living with memory, rather than resolving it.
MH: In your poem “Breath Is a Body at War,” there is a line that says, “Do you know God is watching us?” and this is one of the few moments in the collection where God is explicitly mentioned. Additionally, in your essay “In the Name of Survival, Tricks, & Selena Quintanilla,” published in The Offing, you describe an intimate encounter and quote your partner asking, “Do you think God was watching us?” Across both moments, the idea of a watchful God feels significant, especially in relation to sexuality, queerness, and the body, where intimacy is paired with a sense of being seen or judged. How does this ever-present or observing God shape the way you write about queer intimacy and the body? And more broadly, what role does religion—or your experience growing up as a Jehovah’s Witness—play in your poetry?
SH: When you grow up in a religion like Jehovah’s Witness, ideas about purity, morality, shame, and the body don’t just stay in church—they are internalized. In moments of queer intimacy there can be echo of questions such as: Who is allowed to desire? What is permitted? What/Who is being judged? For me, growing up in such a heavy religion traumatized me. From a young age, I knew I was different but I didn’t have the language to name it so early on. There are many layers I’m pulling apart still from this experience. Poetry continues to give me room to reimagine and challenge the idea of God’s gaze, which can be questioned, reframed, or even reclaimed. Poetry pushes me to ask question like, What does it mean to be seen fully and honestly—in a body which has been marked as wrong? Is this gaze always condemning, or can it be transformed into something else: witnessing, care, or even self-recognition?
MH: Your poem “Defying the Dangers of Being” explores the fears and frustrations of being “other” in an American society that often oppresses and antagonizes anyone who is not heteronormative and white. Many of your poems also take up migration and queerness, but they don’t always appear in the same space. We’re curious about this separation and overlap. How has exploring these “othered” identities through your poetry helped you come to understand what they mean to you, both individually and in relation to each other? In what ways do you find that these identities come together and sustain you, and in what ways do they come into tension or conflict?
SH: For me, exploring these identities in my poetry signifies how I dealt with shifting through identities as I grew up. I also think of spaces and how each space can require more of one identity than the other. Even though I am a multitude of selves, I experienced everything at different periods of my life. For example, I didn’t come out and experience my queerness until I was in my early 20s. Before then, growing up I saw daily how my former undocumented parents struggled to obtain jobs or keep our family afloat. When it came time to put some of these experiences down on paper, I began writing from those certain points of view. Writing about migration centers geography, language, and my family’s history, while writing about queerness focuses more on the body, desire, and intimacy. However, both are shaped by questions of belonging, visibility, and survival. In poetry those threads are braided or pulled apart depending on what the moment requires, rather than forcing them into a single, fixed narrative. I believe my identities sustain me by reminding me where they meet most clearly. Through my identities, it involves learning how to read environments such as, where it’s safe to speak, to be visible, to take up room. For me, those shared awarenesses can become a kind of resource. It sharpens perception, builds adaptability, and creates a sensitivity to others who are also navigating margins. In that sense, they can sustain each other by offering different strategies for survival and connection. I’m also aware there can be inherited expectations around family, culture, or survival which don’t align with queer identity, which is where tension and conflict come into play. There can also be external pressures which treat identities as incompatible or demand one be made more visible than the other. Poetry is a place to sit with discomfort rather than resolving it.
MH: “Defying the Dangers of Being” is also striking in its form. The poem is printed in a landscape layout, with centered stanzas whose lines move in a kind of diagonal, zigzagging pattern across the page, creating a strong sense of momentum. How did you arrive at that shape? Do you think of it as belonging to a particular form, or is it something you developed specifically for this poem? Were there guiding principles or constraints you followed as you shaped it, and what kinds of influences—visual, poetic, or otherwise—helped lead you to its final structure?
SH: “Defying the Dangers of Being” is a poem I began writing during my M.F.A. program at the University of Texas at El Paso. I lived on the other side of the mountain, which is to say I lived in the central area of El Paso. To get to school I could either take the streets or drive through the mountain’s scenic route, which is called Scenic Drive. I chose the scenic route because of the views and how it always made me reflect on borders, since you can see both countries from above. At the time, I was also an active runner and every Sunday morning the route up and down the mountain was closed and was open for the public to walk, run, bike, etc. Almost every Sunday morning, I woke up and ran up and down the scenic route. My act of running transformed into an act of art as every curve of the route started showing up in the poem as its form. It was at Scenic Drive where I reflected on a lot of many themes like visibility, borders, adaptability, and so on. This poem is one of the earliest ones I wrote and one I treasure as it’s a reminder of my time in El Paso. Essentially this poem was a seed to this collection.
MH: Continuing this thread about form, many of your poems, like “Strand of a Memory” and “Illusion of Light,” move through shifts in voice, nonlinear storytelling, and fragmented structure, often in ways that resist more straightforward or linear expectations. How do you think about that relationship between form and content? Do you begin writing with a particular structure in mind, or does the form emerge as you follow the poem’s content?
SH: Most of the time in my writing the form is the last element to come into conversation with the content I’m writing about. Although my content can be nonlinear, fragmented, and shifting in voice, I’d like to think it mimics everyday life and how the movement of ideas and memories quickly gravitate towards another in span of seconds. I can step outside and hear a bird, and it can take me to a memory of the zoo, then from the zoo I can think of who I went with, which then would take me to a memory of being with them, and so on. For the most part, I don’t think of content or form; if I have a certain image in mind I can sit and begin with it and from there, I let the content come out as it wants to come out. My first drafts are always messy. There may also be not much I keep in the content. It is an ongoing transformation of content. Writers must be willing to come to the page with nothing and leave with nothing (sometimes). I find my writing comes in bursts of memories and my job is to make them make sense as I patch and weave them together. Form comes at the end of my content. I ask the content questions of how it wants to be told—of how it wants to escape on the page.
MH: In your conversation with The Rumpus, you ask, “What does the form want to say or be?” Was there a poem in this collection where the form changed significantly in revision, where you realized that the structure, or even the white space, was saying something the earlier draft wasn’t? Thinking also about a poem like “Missing Tío,” which incorporates a photograph of your father: How did the presence of that image shape your process? Did it change what the language needed to do, or push you to write against the image rather than simply explain it?
SH: Most of my poems are written like prose. The stage of revision is where the fun happens and I get to explore the content and the form. A poem which changed drastically was the titular poem for this collection, “How to Kill a Goat & Other Monsters.” Both content and form changed through the whole revision process. At one point, this poem was over seven pages long and at it was also just one page. In revision, I negotiate what is at risk in the poem, as in to say what is the center of it/where is it trying to get to. From there I am able to pull the layers which don’t align with the poem anymore. For the poem “Missing Tío,” I needed to include an image because sometimes language isn’t enough. In this case, the language in this poem was failing. Every draft I did was not as clear. I thought about form, art, and the possibilities of taking an alternative route. I realized by including an image which resembles a missing person flyer was a path I could take. The image ended up capturing the desperation I was trying to seize in the language.
MH: “In Another Life,” the first poem in How to Kill a Goat and Other Monster, has a line that reads: “I never learned to open my mouth.” This act of “opening the mouth”—as well as images of the mouth, throat, tongue, and teeth—recurs throughout the book. What does “opening the mouth” come to represent for you over the course of the collection, and how you think about the role of the body in shaping the language of your poems? We’re also wondering whether this attention to the body connects to writers who have influenced you, like Laurie Ann Guerrero, whose collection A Tongue in the Mouth of the Dying you’ve written about. We love Guerrero’s line about how poetry “starts in the gut.”
SH: For me, “opening the mouth” represents the speaker of the poems taking agency back. Throughout the collection, the speaker encounters many moments where they are faced with violence, trauma, grief, etc. In these instants the speaker stays quiet. It isn’t until the final poem in the collection, “How to Kill a Goat & Other Monsters,” where the speaker opens his mouth to say at the end, “Because to kill would mean I’m a monster too / & I want to end with beauty.” At the end the speaker is finally able to vocalize what they have witnessed their whole life—monstrous acts and terror. By speaking at the end of what they want to be and how they would like to live (in beauty) the speaker is able to take agency back. The speaker is able to reclaim their power and their voice because his mouth is finally able to open. Laurie Ann Guerrero has been one of my inspirations in poetry. I believe each poet has their own theories of where poetry begins. For me, poetry begins in the eyes. It is through what we observe we give meaning to and it is through images in which most poetry stays with its readers.
MH: Across your poems and essays, you move between English and Spanish in ways that feel very intentional. Often, Spanish appears in moments of dialogue spoken by family members, while a first-person speaker’s interior voice is more often in English. And in “Notes on Sueñitos,” you write, “I disappear when Spanish comes out of me,” which suggests a kind of tension or distance within language itself. How do you think about your relationship to Spanish in your writing? Does it feel like a language of memory, of family, of grief? Are there things that can only be said, or felt, in one language and not the other? And how do you think about that moment of “disappearing”? What’s happening there for the speaker?
SH: Language is crucial to me because in my hometown of San Antonio, TX most people either code switch or code mesh both English and Spanish. This kind of language is Spanglish or Pocho. It’s very common to speak this way here and most of the time I don’t even know I’m doing it when I’m talking to family, friends, or even strangers. Spanish is my mother tongue, while English is my academic tongue. There is a phrase in Spanish ni de aquí, ni de allá which loosely translates to “neither from here, nor there.” It has been difficult, for me, to feel included in both America and in Mexico. I’m too Mexican to be American and too American to be Mexican. It is easy to feel like I’m disappearing in a country where raids are happening every day or where people are afraid to admit their heritage. In poetry, I sought out to write as organically as I could and when I wrote dialogue in English it didn’t sound right when I read those pieces out loud. In a way, I’m using juxtaposition of languages to show how I’m taking agency over Spanish and to express how the speaker in the poems fears it.
MH: Love is an overarching theme throughout your book, and we were especially struck by the simplicity and beauty of the final lines in “My Love Would Have Killed You”: “everything will pass by like lightning / memory is like that / & you’ll only remember love.” Reading those lines, we thought about how difficult it can be, as a writer, to approach an experience while still emotionally immersed in it—before there’s been enough distance to arrive at something like that clarity, or that sense of only remembering love. This reminded us of William Wordsworth’s idea, in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads, that “poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings” that “takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity.” Does this idea resonate with your own process? Do you tend to write from within intense emotional moments, or do you find that you need some distance, some form of that “tranquillity,” before you can shape an experience into a poem?
SH: I tell my students to be careful when they write in those intense moments of passion for our emotions can get the best of us. I do agree with William Wordsworth’s idea about letting the emotion sit and settle first, which will allow for even a great epiphany—maybe even a revelation. Most of what I have written about in this collection occurred over two decades. There are a few instances where I do write poems from events which happened within a month or so and I feel like those are some of the hardest ones to write. Even right now, one of my projects is dealing with the death of my tía. It has been a bit over two years, the emotions are still heightened for me, and they sometimes impede me from writing clearly. I’d like to think most of my work comes from inner peace and acceptance. From there, I can look at how what I write can be transformed into art.
MH: Do you ever play hooky? If you do, what is your favorite thing to do when you take off suddenly, as in a dérive?
SH: I believe most writers avoid the page as much as possible. There’s something about coming face to face with what I want to put on paper which terrifies me. I call it a ritual, but it is mostly my avoidant behaviour of cleaning everything thoroughly before I sit down to write. Even then when I’m done cleaning, I tell myself I deserve the day off, ha-ha. Overall, my form of hooky varies, if it’s not cleaning then it can be as simple as turning on an incense stick, playing some music (lately it has been Ethel Cain), and laying down on the carpet. Or, it can be scrolling on Instagram for baking recipes I’ll never attempt.