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ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. One reason Michelle Otero chose “Bosque” as the title for her debut poetry collection was the “Walking With Poets” project she organized when she was Albuquerque Poet Laureate.
“I’d invite a local poet to co-host a walk in the bosque. They’d pick a trail and a poet whose work they want to celebrate. We’d stop along the walk to hear a poem and write,” Otero said in an email.
Michelle Otero
Those walks were open to the public. Usually, a dozen or more people attended. Some poems in Otero’s recently published collection started as prompts from those monthly walks. “The bosque invites you to pay attention. Poetry does the same thing. So there’s a natural connection,” she said.
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Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham and state health officials insist New Mexico’s centralized state vaccine distribution system – one of the few in the country – is random, fair and equitable.
There’s little doubt it is amazingly efficient – as of Wednesday, the Department of Health says 450,299 of the 454,350 shots the state has received have been put into New Mexico arms. That’s 99.1%, which makes our state a top performer. The Department of Health says we’re third best in the nation.
Now it appears the state is trying to rein in providers who have been giving the vaccine to desperate New Mexicans without requiring them to go through the Department of Health for an appointment. The state health officials say they are working to “onboard” these providers into the state system, and that seems wrong-headed.