Layla Benitez-James

Nov 30, 2023 | altaonline.com | Layla Benitez-James

When my son, now four, asks me how he grew in my belly, the most emotionally honest answer I can offer is, I really don’t know. I quote science at him, but no fact makes truly legible the way it felt, still feels, like an impossible, magical, creepy, painful, and exciting secret within my body. Only metaphors have broken through, coming close to something I can recognize.

Aug 9, 2023 | sierraclub.org | Layla Benitez-James

The Japanese idea of "microseasons" may be a better way to mark time

Aug 9, 2023 | sierraclub.org | Layla Benitez-James

My parents taught me to recognize plants with our wild yard in Austin, Texas, as my textbook. In spring, the honeysuckle began to leaf out and slowly devour our mailbox. As the weeks passed, my parents donned winter coats and bicycle helmets each time they went to check the mail in order to withstand the dive-bombing from the mockingbirds that chose to nest there. Eventually, they installed a new mailbox and left our old one to the honeysuckle cloud.

Apr 3, 2023 | poetryfoundation.org | Marwa Helal |Diego Baez |Dionne Brand |Layla Benitez-James

I can’t bring myself to think of disaster as a single, or even a handful, of fixed peaks on a graph. The graph wavers and caves into itself. Who gets to define disaster? Who writes and measures it? Elissa Washuta writes of disaster, in her essay “Apocalypse Logic,” as an ongoing state of settler coloniality: “Apocalypse has very little to do with the end of the world.” Disaster has long been a continuum through which racialized bodies move against, in spite of.