Boundary. The thing that surrounds or holds. A figure traced on the ground when a spell is vast, something that marks off a territory that cannot be violated––and that does so because someone wants to violate it.

In a monologue that at times manifests the self-centeredness of autofiction and at others is like a long improvised poem, Luna Miguel asks herself how much of the vanquished and how much of the vanquisher abide in her feminine voice at a moment when feminism is waging one of its greatest wars ever. Behind the barrier, tied down and oppressed, her chains getting heavier all the time, the poet asks herself what the meaning of freedom is, how to take care amid the battle, what are the erotics of the person who knows she is defeated and yet relishes her pain, because it may be the only thing she has left.

We learn the name of the girl reciting: she is Tenderness. What we don’t know is the name of the recipient of these letters. In a play of literary genres, writer Luna Miguel brings together in these pages a bit of poetry, a bit of essay, a bit of fairy tales, and a bit of dirty monologue. Her intention is never to respond to Miguel de Cervantes’s Numancia, it’s to imagine the outline of those barriers in her own flesh, those walls, those last shouts of love: What’s the point of talking about freedom? How do you show the wounds of battle? Is it permissible to feel such desire, especially if one is already humilated, oppressed, defeated?