“That,” he said, “is why we do the exercises. Not to trap poetry, but to set it free.”

“The tree is an old immigrant,” Sofía said softly. “It bleeds red in a land that never taught it its name.”

“Good! The wind cannot be indifferent, but now it feels like a snob ignoring an old friend. Next: hipérbole.”

“This isn’t writing,” she muttered to her friend Leo. “This is dissection.”

She opened her notebook and, for the first time, didn’t underline or circle anything. She just wrote.