When There Were Ghosts

The poem’s 12 stanzas of couplets (two lines each) allow the images to be developed in multiple stanzas. This creates the sensation of the stanzas bleeding into one another like the projected movie images on the screen and cigarette smoke. The arrangement of the 24 lines in this way causes the poem’s form to mirror its content.

Ríos’s poems are somewhat narrative—they tell a story. The first stanza sets the scene of the story he tells about his childhood. He grew up in Nogales, Arizona, which borders a Mexican town of the same name, in the 1950s and ‘60s. Traveling between the border of the Mexican town and the Arizona town is reflected in the structure of stanzas as well as in their content. The town’s dual national identity—American and Mexican—is reflected in how each stanza contains two lines (couplets). The content of all the stanzas develops the image of the projected movie being both in the smoke and on the screen. This doubling of the movie’s projection is like the doubling of the town’s name across the border. There is the American side of the town and “the Mexico side” (Line 1) of the town.