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Interview by New England Poetry Club Co-President Doug Holder.

Recently, I was at a New England Poetry Club reading to hear poet Robbie Gamble and others read from their work. Gamble has a new chapbook out titled A Can of Pinto Beans. Gamble generously gave me a copy and I decided to interview this accomplished bard.

From his website:

Robbie Gamble’s poems have appeared in the Atlanta Review, Poet Lore, RHINO, Spillway, and The Sun, among other journals. His essays have appeared in MassPoetry, Pangyrus, Scoundrel Time, Solstice, and Tahoma Literary Review. Recipient of the Carve Poetry prize, and a Peter Taylor Fellowship at the Kenyon Summer Writers Workshop, he holds an MFA from Lesley University, and he serves as poetry editor for Solstice: A Magazine of Diverse Voices.

Robbie worked for twenty years as a nurse practitioner with Boston Health Care for the Homeless Program, and he now divides his time between Boston and Vermont.

Doug Holder: These poems arise from your work with the organization NO MORE DEATHS that helps migrants passing through the remote sections of the Sonora Desert along the Arizonia/Mexican borders. Can you tell us a bit about your experience?

Robbie Gamble: Prior to COVID, I spent a chunk of time each summer for several years volunteering for No More Deaths/ No Más Muertes in a rugged stretch of desert near Arivaca, Arizona where several thousand known migrant fatalities have occurred over the past decade. The aim of the organization is to prevent further deaths by providing medical and material support to migrants passing through. No More Deaths operated a base camp in the desert with a M.A.S.H. tent-style clinic where we could provide some basic care for injured or exhausted migrants. We also went out daily deeper into the desert, starting in four-wheel-drive vehicles and then continuing on foot, to leave gallon jugs of water and food along known migrant trails, with the hopes of preventing people from becoming dehydrated and malnourished on their journey. Passing through this desert often required them to walk 30 to 60 miles from the border, often being pursued by Border Patrol agents. I’m a nurse practitioner, and I’m fairly fluent in Spanish, so I had a good skill set for the work. The conditions were difficult, with daytime temperatures sometimes exceeding 110 degrees. We were also sometimes harassed by Border Patrol agents, who did not approve of our activities. At the time I was volunteering, there was a shaky agreement between No More Deaths and the Tucson Sector Command of Border Patrol allowing us to operate the Arivaca base camp, but it was still stressful to work in such a highly militarized zone where we were often under surveillance.

DH: A Can of Pinto Beans seems like a rather pedestrian title for a book of verse. But it is so much more than a can of beans, isn’t it?

RG: The Sonoran Desert is a vast, open space where we rarely encountered the people we were trying to support. Mostly we were aware of migrants’ activities by the things they left behind: footprints, trash, discarded possessions, and on occasion, human remains. I came to envision the chapbook as a collection of bits of evidence that people had passed through this desert space, and how they had experienced their journey. The title poem A Can of Pinto Beans is a kind of cinematic zoom shot, beginning with a panorama of the horizon and then focusing down onto this one piece of trailside detritus, which had been violently destroyed by a Border Patrol agent in order to deny migrants a small portion of possibly life-saving nutrition. So to me, the can embodies the migrants’ journey, and our small efforts to alleviate their suffering, and the institutional violence simultaneously being deployed to prevent their passage.

DH: Did you plan to write poems about your work, or did it just naturally arise?

RG: I wrote a sequence of five poems upon returning from one of my earlier trips to Arizona, and I shared them in a workshop. Eileen Cleary read them, and she said, “This needs to be a chapbook, and I want to publish it.” I didn’t think I had enough material for a manuscript, but she kept after me, and eventually I wrote some more poems about the work, and included some found snippets from my journal and from operational logbooks to flesh out the project, and she did publish it, in Lily Poetry Review Press.

DH: In your poem Water Bearer you seem to question your journey into these harsh environs – you seem to be asking yourself about your motives and why you abandoned your comfort zone.

RG: Very much so. It sometimes seemed that what we were doing was a small drop in a very dry bucket, and I wondered if our efforts were having much of an impact at all. And the conditions were difficult, both physically and psychologically. But I’ve also worked with political refugees and undocumented folks for much of my adult life, and I’ve heard many stories about how a chance moment made it possible for someone to survive. And that spurs me on to do what I can.

DH: Why should we read this book?

RG: “The Border Crisis” is very much in the news these days, couched in broad, menacing, dehumanizing terms. What I hoped to do in this book is to present a more granular, up-close picture of what is taking place at this particular stretch of the border, what is at stake for the human beings who feel compelled to risk this journey, because they can no longer remain in their communities of origin. I also tried to explore the complicated relationship among three distinct cultures in these borderlands, the indigenous peoples who have lived in the region for centuries, for whom the idea of a border is a colonial construct; the groups of Latinos from the South who are passing through in search a safer, more tolerable life; and the Anglo-American forces who hold the technology and the firepower and the legislative wherewithal to dictate who gets to enter and who is excluded. I’m writing as a witness, someone who is not from this harsh geography, but I hope that I have been able to put in enough time and observation to bring some insight into the injustices that I have seen.

A Can of Pinto Beans

Just below the ridgeline saddle
tossed to the side of the trail
lying dented among rocks,
bleached label peeled back,
and the downhill-facing end
of the can stabbed through
by some Border Patrol agent’s
Ka-Bar knife, a precise wound
mouldering around the edges,
with filaments wafting down
the corners, no, they’re streams
of tiny ants, crawling in and out,
bearing flecks of nourishment away.

— Robbie Gamble