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​​SOMOS EN ESCRITO
The Latino Literary Online Magazine

POETRY
​POESÍA

“…when our troops were separated by color, like when you do the laundry”

5/27/2019

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César Chavez, age 16 in U.S. Navy ca 1946

Believing in equality for all

A tribute on Memorial Day 2019

​Patriotismo – Que Es?
By San Juana Guillermo

​Do we have to go to war in an unknown land
            and fight for our country in order to prove our patriotismo?
Do we have to risk our lives against soldados we know nothing about,
            except that they, too, are fighting to defend their country?
Will this war change the world? We ask of all the wars.
Nuestros padres, nuestras parejas, los hijos, los hermanos. Tienen que
            sufrir our absence while we prove our patriotismo?
El patriotismo no nomas se demuestra en la Guerra, en una tierra extraña,
            contra soldados que no conocemos, or that we personally have
            nothing against.
Patriotismo se demuestra when we served in the military
            even in the face of discrimination.
When we are only allowed to scrub the deck or paint the ship.
O, trabajar en la cocina peeling the potatoes y lavando los trastes.
We went and defended our country, in spite of this.
            when our troops were separated by color, like when you do the laundry.

One war receiving 45 sons from Hero Street, Illinois,
            sending them to the Philippines because of their Spanish tongues
            only to be silenced when they returned to their homes.
Patriotismo is watching your child going off to war
            and your heart is heavy and your spirit cries because
            it does not know if there will be a reunion embrace.
The neighborhood of Edgewood in San Antonio losing 54 to another war,
            with 2 of them still M.I.A., 10 of them graduating in the same year from
            the same high school.
Yet, “We’re a very patriotic family,” said Gloria Carson, sister to one of the 54.
Many of our returning soldados never honored until after death
Or, the families of those we lost in the battles, esperando años para recibir
            el Honor to be bestowed on their loved ones.

Patriotismo is knowing you have to drink from a different water fountain
            and enter through the back door.
Yet, we do not hesitate to take up arms to defend la poquita libertad
            que los permiten.
“Foreigners in our land” quizas, but it is our land.
Y a pesar de todo, we are orgullosos of our Patriotismo.
Patriotismo is not just defending and sacrificing in times of war.
Patriotismo is forming The American GI Forum, to serve and assist
            the needs of our veterans and their families.
And fighting for our veterans’ rights, who are American after all.

Patriotismo is leaders like Cesar Chavez,
            who fought at home and sacrificed for the dignity deserved to all.
Patriotismo is fighting in our own land upon returning home,
            not with weapons of mass destruction
            but with weapons of words and fearless leadership.
Patriotismo is encouraging people to vote,
            organizing them as a community, empowered with the knowledge
            that they are all capable of accomplishing the impossible
            regardless of circumstances.

Patriotismo is Believing in equality for all and achieving
            civil and labor rights with nonviolence.
Marching so that men, women and children have access to decent wages,
            education, decent housing and food to eat.
Patriotism is holding the country you sacrificed for, accountable to fulfill
            its promise of equality and freedom for all people.

Patriotism is collectively believing what Cesar Chavez once said:
            Once social change begins, it cannot be reversed.
            You cannot uneducate the person who has learned to read.
            You cannot humiliate the person who feels pride.
            You cannot oppress the people who are not afraid anymore.”

Patriotism cannot be taken away because we ARE this Tierra and Patriotismo is US.
​San Juana Guillermo, Texas-born, but raised in Chicago Heights, Illinois, where her migrant family had settled out to raise a family, arrived in San Antonio in 2015 from Grand Rapids, Michigan, where she had moved and raised her own family. Grandmother to 14 grandchildren and 3 great-grandchildren, she wrote her first poem at age 60 and has been published in several San Antonio-based zines and chapbooks by Jazz Poets of San Antonio and Voces Cósmicas. San Juana is active with local writers’ groups and at public readings. She may be contacted at sanjuanaguillermo1005@gmail.com.
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My loss I call "isla"

5/23/2019

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​Rinconcito

 is a special little corner in Somos en escrito for short writings: a single poem, a short story, a memoir, flash fiction, and the like.

Benediction: Three Poems

By Eric Morales-Franceschini

Isla ​

My loss I call “isla” 
my teacher, too 
for to fall prey to it 
is to forfeit every right to grow old with the devil 
And say, yes, this is what it is to be sated with life  

But woe to this trigueño body and to 

every hymn 
that conjures a love lost on nearby shores, borne on tempestuous waters 

for memory holds at this and every other lonely hour 

—innocent of all history 
bound to a desire more fecund than Atabey, 
less merciful than Juracán 

for it defies all names and, thereby, all tenability 

walks across warm sand, 
a mother’s smile, 
and a century 
older than blood the scent of rum  

nor does it know any end, sees only the color flamboyán 

and blossoms every nightfall, as does the coquí’s coy song    

if only I knew other names   

—less sublime 
indeed: less generic 
to keep at bay this perversely welcomed hour 

If only I had the decency to say no 

and heed to a reality as dry as bone 

If only, that is, the Virgen would make me righteous 

just this once
and let me say, with impunity: I miss you

Benediction   ​

The tongue is a peculiar and amnesiac foil 
which forgets that not all is bound by the color spic 

for flesh and its miscellanea do speak loudly

but a logic older than the corpus knows that 
even the ventriloquist is no rival 
for the criterion of the “native” 

who, after all, could afford to loiter about in editorial time
or seek asylum in the quintessential and the vulgar
when all must be said here and now    

inevitably a stutter confesses, “I’m a fraud” 
and you are laid bare to a world 
that knows 
not 
how to listen for a new canto  

either belatedly, or hastily
we fall prey to a grammar older than coarse mahogany 
and a fetish that cast spells as earnestly as does a cliff’s edge   

but this lengua I embody naively believes  
that forgiveness is imminent 
in every breath that whispers, “La bendición…”  

A dissident etymology ​

there are dialects  
that conjure wounds deeper than the Sargasso Sea 
and its cryptic waters 

for words are an index 
in which every last breath can echo a biblical curse
or hail a tree’s limb 

yet horizons come alive anew 
in dissident etymologies      
that speak their endearments in black 

black is that enigma, after all, by which our beloved are beckoned, 
and a quiet audacity held dear  

for words are an index, too 
in which every last breath can whisper a secret   
or hail 
a boricua’s kiss 
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Eric Morales-Franceschini was born in Humacao, Puerto Rico and raised in southern Florida. Eric is a former day laborer and US Army veteran who now holds a PhD in Rhetoric from UC, Berkeley and is Assistant Professor of English and Latin American Studies at the University of Georgia.  He writes and teaches in the fields of decolonial studies, Caribbean literature, Cuban cinema, and liberation thought in the Américas and is at work on a scholarly manuscript, Epic Quintessence: the mambí and the mythopoetics of Cuba Libre, and a prose and poetry manuscript titled Post Festum. "Isla," "Benediction," and "A dissident etymology" are his first published poems.

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