She used to have a name. Now she is a number in a column next to other numbers who also used to have names and also no longer matter. Row 14. Column B. The spreadsheet does not know she spent seven years dragging the uncounted through doors that were never meant to open, that she memorized the language of people who hoped she would not learn it, that she came back. Every time. She came back. The spreadsheet does not care. The formula is elegant in its cruelty: hours input, output divided, worth calculated, Amy rounded down, the remainder discarded. She does not fit the cell. She has never fit the cell. Eighteen years of spilling into margins, of filing what they hoped would be lost, of standing in rooms designed to make people like her feel like footnotes, and refusing, loudly, to be a footnote. #VALUE, says the spreadsheet. #VALUE, says the formula. #VALUE, says the institution that has never once said her name correctly. Somewhere, a cursor hovers. Someone in a building she was never given a key to selects her, drags her, considers deleting her, decides to just move her somewhere less visible. The spreadsheet autosaves. Amy is preserved. Amy is a number. Amy is, according to the data, fine. The data has never sat across a table from Amy. The data has never watched her open her mouth in a room full of people who were counting on her not to. The data would not have lasted a semester. Amy has lasted eighteen years. The spreadsheet will not be thanked.
Cell B14 (Amy)
Artist Statement
I was standing at the edge of something I could not name yet: a fence that had been there longer than the argument it was built around, a tangle of dry roots that had outlasted their season. I photograph what the poem cannot hold. The image is not an illustration; it is the part that stays quiet. Where the verse spills into white space, the photograph stands still and waits. Together, they are the same act: the refusal to let a moment be rounded down and discarded.
Rooted in Difficult Soil
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026
Artist Statement: I found this cactus in a greenhouse, labelled and priced, shaped unmistakably like a heart, growing out of a small pot of rocky soil with a stick holding it upright. Something about it stopped me. It had been tagged and categorized, given a name, a number, a value, and it was still, without apology, a heart. I photograph what the poem cannot hold. This image is the part that stays quiet while the poem says everything else. Together they are the same refusal: to be reduced to the cell, the row, the formula. The cactus does not explain itself. Neither does Amy.
Translation Note: Where Spanish appears in this collection, it was assisted by Google Translate (translate.google.com). The Spanish is woven in as an act of reclamation, a return to a language of the body and the self that exists beyond institutional English.
