death’s many signatures in Sicily’s quicksilver seas 
the moon and its argent micronauts 
uncounted in the recesses of Sierra Madre 
actors with faces of timeless burros 
named Cárdenas foraging in sugar cane 
coldness at the center of the sun 
seventeen years or forty-nine years 
the instant is the same for whatever happens 
the body is only the thought of the body 
incense and wharves of the conquistadores 
liana and ivy snares at the hour’s second end 
how often this occurs and cannot recall 
the why and which the who and wherefore 
the canals of Tenochtitlán lose their way 
among withered rooftop garlands  
I remember nothing after pushing the green button 
but salutes of armless angels the rose 
through which a river pours and summers that 
belong to memory’s only syllable and heat 
the roar of Aetna’s ovens twenty marigold flowers  
Narcissus and Hyacinth eye and pulp of 
repercussion blindness of water and depths 
where night’s riddle threads an unheard harp  
calacas y calaveras ! thousands at play 
with missing fingers nameless deities 
in a single afternoon making rosaries of light 
smoke snaking through vowels of perpetuity  
toys that imitate sleep’s small noises  
tender the hair that falls around the wing 
shimmering hues of nacre consonants 
why is speech so difficult today ? 
colibrí ! ruby-throated messenger of death 
clouds the size of silence and glass 
motion and gravity have lost all sense  
evening fades in the vestibule of echo 
one hand seeks the other  
in an abyss of shape 
darkness of words  
dos mariposas de la noche ! 
 
11-01-20 

​​​​​​Ivan Argüelles is a Mexican American innovative poet whose work moves from early Beat and surrealist-influenced forms to later epic-length poems. He received the Poetry Society of America’s William Carlos Williams Award in 1989 as well as the Before Columbus Foundation’s American Book Award in 2010.  In 2013, Argüelles received the Before Columbus Foundation’s Lifetime Achievement Award. 

TAMAZUNCHALE
 
antes de abrir la demencia para descubrir
palabra tras palabra que no tiene sentido
diccionario de pulmones ! pulgas y rascacielos !
para mejor comprender lo que pasa dentro del ladrillo rojo
al margen de la calle que nos lleva al sur donde
los muertos tratan de olvidar lo que pasó ayer
cuando la gran máquina de nubes y sonidos
se acostó al lado del mar que sufre tantas camas
inexplicables y sin eco y ahora dime que quieres
con tus ojos apagados y tu mente como sirena
de ulises llamando a todos los náufragos
que la ambulancia está lista a partir !
ya me voy  hacia la mejor tortillera que hay
para besarla en su coma de vidas paralelas
y entonces con una tristeza mundial
seguiré caminando un brazo mas famoso que el otro
una oreja de piedra y otra en ninguna parte
para qué poner en dos el uno ?
multiplicar significa morir !
 
07-21-20​

TEOCALLI
    for Joe who appeared  yesterday morning
for a fraction of an instant in the doorway
 
standing in the light of the morning sun
confused with radiance and dazzling
the stanzas of an unwritten poem shift
in the monumental distances of air
crane-feathered shafts rotate like minds
ablaze in the pyramidal distances of sky
stone built on stone stepping to heaven
solar flares like tongues speaking loud
the destructions of cloud and thunder
and ever deeper the effects of amnesia
rain drowning cities of fine dust citadels
of bone and tumult havoc of wheels
spun out of control bringing down all
ten directions and mountains reared
overnight to mark off the western margin
where the archaic sea darkens rushing
to mirror itself in a dream of feathers
and the twins up and down they go
tracing each periphery of rock and grass
measuring how far it is to the lunar aleph
fading like dissolved aspirin at dawn
what fills the ear at such an early hour
if not the Sanskrit parrot reciting
chronologies and adamantine dynasties
names none can rightly recall inscribed
on the reverse of coins or obliterated
by a mere thumb on porous sandstone
libraries ! the tomb of words and to speak
the labyrinthine dialects communing
with deities of the Unseen and Unheard
pages torn at random from the codex
depicting the origins of divine Chaos
night ! splendors of ink in canyons
where the dead revive use of their hands
such a morning atop the great Teocalli
converting sums of air into breathless voice
hail all the heights and renown of fire !
we have come down the Panamerican
visiting each of the summers of 1953
and talking backwards to mummified
relatives wrapped in serapes of liquid gold
we will never reach tomorrow for sure
the Nymph death will take one of us
before the prophesy can be fulfilled
every day is this single bright moment
standing like phantom pharaohs immobile
in the pellucid movie film of memory
you are me and I am you ! there is grass
and maps strewn all over the lawn
and avenues that stretch as far back as
the first city carved out of the womb
ten minutes apart the matching Teocallis
that cast no shadow only black light !
 
06-11-20

May 28, 2016. 5:20 A.M. 2500 members of the public forces entered the area.
What they found: 130 underage sexual workers, 508 homeless people,
56 slot machines, 1000 “bazuco” doses, 1 kidnapped victim behind a false wall.
 
Two alleys in between a police command,
a military garrison and a church, L-shaped:
to the right, there was a clandestine market of stolen
objects, to the left, taquilleros that trafficked
one dose of bazuco for 2000 pesos--
queues of dried mouths and fidgeting thumbs. They sold
 
20 doses per minute, 8 taquillas sold
460 million pesos’ worth. They would command
the homeless to smuggle sacks of 2000-peso
bills out on their mules. Every day was shaped
by weed rolls and bazuco bags. They trafficked
cocaine residues cooked in red gasoline, stolen
 
bone and brick dust. Lives were stolen:
“The vicio does not spare anyone,” they sold
the promise of a lawless paradise, trafficked
the cheapest drugs. Influence would command
even the wide-eyed rich to trade their steel-shaped
watches for a night in an olla—4000 pesos
 
for a consumption safehouse—a few pesos
for a prostitute. “El bazuco had stolen
the glow in her eyes and her crystal-shaped
shoes when I fell for her. She was sold
to a taquillero three weeks after her first command--
she lost her teeth but never her beauty. They trafficked
 
her body.” Through tunnels, they trafficked
victims underground--sapos who were worth in pesos
less than the bullets they shot. Taquilleros’ commands
for imprisonment in “torture houses” had stolen
their limbs and their poisoned blood. They sold
their remains to be cremated and confined to pill-shaped
 
bazuco powder. Sometimes the devils in L-shaped
Bronx would hide the vice they trafficked--
the souls they lured—the death they sold--
for annual inspections. But with a few pesos,
they bribed their way into the streets they had stolen
to confuse the press and evade the police commands.
 
In 2016 public defense authorities dismantled the area.
They hope to build a Cultural District for the city’s people
by 2023, on top of blood-stained demolished walls.


Glossary:
bazuco,  illegal narcotic substance made from cocaine residue.
taquilleros, operators of points of drug sale within el bronx known as “taquillas.”                                                                                                                
vicio, refers to the addiction caused by bazuco.
sapos, translates literally to “frog,” figuratively to “snitch.”

Laurisa Sastoque, born in Bogotá, Colombia, is a creative writing student at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, where she lives. Due to the Covid-19 situation, she is living in Colombia. “El Bronx, Bogotá D.C” is based on an area in Bogotá, Colombia known as El Bronx.​​

By Sarah Cortez

Vanishing Points: Poems and Photographs of Texas Roadside Memorials, edited by poet Sarah Cortez, is a memorial in itself to the thousands of spontaneous roadside memorials, usually marked by small metal crosses, which line Texas highways. The prominent display of these iconic white crosses, some with accumulated mementoes, is often ignored by motorists.  
​
Yet these roadside memorials are invitations to pause, invitations to ponder the meaning of life and death. This volume of poems responds to these invitations with an array of stunning black and white photographs of these Texas roadside memorials accompanied by poems written by some of the state’s finest poets.

That day you grabbed
the armadillo’s tail
and jerked it upside down
as it snarled and raked
air with black claws.

Remember?  All of us laughing
at the squirming, silver ball
of scaly, pissed-off critter
who’d thought he’d burrow
into safety when chased.

It’d be on that day—if
I could have you back—that
exact moment.  Your right arm
outstretched under scrub oak
alongside a one-lane road.

You, flushed, breathing hard,
sweaty—that instant suspended
the same as that armadillo
who’s now probably as dead as you,
alongside some other back road nearby.

​By Sarah Cortez

But the sky, Nate, the big blue sky
crowns this cross so far above
both you and me that I get scared
just trying to think about it.  And
I promise you I still believe in God,
and I believe in His Only Son Jesus Christ,
and I believe in the Spirit sent down
upon us like the dewfall.  I believe, I
believe, I’ve always believed, but
I have a hole in my chest
where my heart loved you, and I
walk around like a clock without
a mechanism, and I’m not joking
when I say I’m dead too
now. Not just inside, the cold
blackness, but outside, and only,
and only this wind up high here
and the burning sun and
the million pesky grasshoppers buzzing
remind me that God’s ways
are so infinite and beyond,
so far above my mind, my pitiful
body, my heart-no-longer-there
that I’d just better go on
into whatever I have
left after losing you.  Not
that I know what
that is.  But there’s something.
There’s bound to be
something
worth living for.