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​​SOMOS EN ESCRITO
The Latino Literary Online Magazine

POETRY
​POESÍA

A delicious hurt that goes without saying

8/24/2020

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Join the Aztlan Libre Press Facebook page on Sunday, August, 30, 2020, from 3-4 p.m. (central time) for a conversation and reading with Edward Vidaurre, moderated by Juan Tejeda. Click here for more on the event!

An Excerpt of Pandemia & Other Poems
by Edward Vidaurre

WHEN WE WERE CHILDREN
​

It was fun naming clouds and deciphering shapes, until she showed
up, pointed at the sky, at a series of clouds wrestling, and said, that
looks like me fighting off my mother’s boyfriend, let’s wait, maybe
blood will spring from that cloud, that one there she pointed to, the
one that looks like a pair of scissors, or is it legs, with tears already
making a pool on her neckline, I never looked up at clouds again
during my childhood, my town, where blood seeped not only from
our scraped knees and noses after a brawl, but from heaven’s mouth.
NIGHT’S DREAM
For Tony B.

It’s Sunday, Father’s Day 2018. I am somewhere in the middle of
Luzhniki stadium in Russia following this tall, lanky man in a referee
uniform. There are 80,000 plus fans going wild. Mexico vs. Germany
and the weather is perfect, mid 70s and the whistle blows. I am aware
of the crowd but my eyes are on this lanky, grey haired man running
with a whistle hanging from the stickiness of his lips like a cigarette.
The man I run behind is Anthony Bourdain.

Bourdain is the referee, and he has studied the languages and tactics
of both teams. The crowd of Mexican fans love him. He is known for
his love of their country’s cuisine and vacation spots. Germany’s fans
react when he blows the first whistle against their team player by
throwing onions on the field, a metaphor for the tears in their eyes.
He blows the whistle again on the same player and cracks a yolk over
the players head, a yellow card of sorts.

During intermission the players head into the locker rooms and I
follow him into the dressing room where there is a table set for the
entire squad of refs. There is a pig. I remember seeing this pig on
the sidelines earlier. We both walk up to a table with a coffee pot
and crepes. He doesn’t see me sitting next to him. I am the ghost in
my dreams. Anthony retires into a room and sits down to smoke a
cigarette that smells like roses.

My dream switches to me riding a mule on a mountain and I feel
anxiety. The mule’s hoof slips and we both fall on the side of the
mountain, I wake up and I’m running on the sidelines. There’s a
free kick coming for the German team and Bourdain tells the player
before kicking it to eat a bowl of spaghetti. He does and sends a
bending ball just over the net.

The game is tied at 0.

There are 20 minutes left to play and 3 players total have egg yolk
running down their faces. A fast crossing run and a pass to the inside,
another pass down the middle of the field and the Mexican player
falls back like a game of trust and swings his leg to kick the ball into
the right hand corner of the goal.

The crowd goes wild for the first goal of the match. Onions are thrown
on the field again and the referee sees a melee between two players.
One of the players, with egg on his face, spits at the feet of the much
smaller player and Bourdain pulls out a chef knife, the pig runs to him,
he slices the pig in half and holds the bloody knife in the air.
​
The first suspension of the game. He points at the players with the
knife and says, who wants to go next? On the sidelines, where the pig
was, children run around laughing.
THE AFTERSHOCK

There’s a delicious hurt that goes without saying, the second it sinks
in. Flowers do a thing with their petals you hadn’t noticed before, you
still don’t accept that there is a smell when you smash an ant to death,
but you take a big whiff and nature plays a trick on you by sending the
scent of rain and blood gathered from a day not long ago, that’s what
it’s like after a loss, after an earthquake, after a breakup, especially
when a person walks away, immediately change occurs, like driving a
vehicle off the lot, the value changes, so the moon decides to make its
best entrance in forever, and calls for a party with your favorite stars
and they’re just looming up there, like saying, “hey!,” and you die a
little inside, and the music plays and you take up smoking again and
quit in the same breath, again... always again, there’s a horoscope
reading you missed last week that nailed this moment, you go back
and it all makes sense, you take inventory of your now, your now was
yesterday, again, and again the rain comes down, you let it wash you
and the ground you stand on softens, you start to sink into the soil,
and that delicious hurt doesn’t taste so bad anymore, it just roots you
with your existence, again.

Tell me, how does it feel to survive when everything else dies?
Click here to purchase a copy of Pandemia & Other Poems directly from Aztlan Libre Press.
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Edward Vidaurre’s writings have appeared or are forthcoming in The New York Times Magazine, The Texas Observer, Grist, Poet Lore, The Acentos Review, Poetrybay, Voices de la Luna, and other journals and anthologies. Vidaurre has been a judge for submissions for the Houston Poetry Festival, editor for the Rio Grande Valley International Poetry Festival anthology Boundless 2020, and editor of Cutthroat, a journal of the arts. He is the author of seven collections of poetry, and is the 2018-2019 City of McAllen, Texas Poet Laureate. He is a four-time Pushcart Prize-nominated poet and publisher of FlowerSong Press, and its sister imprint Juventud Press. Vidaurre is from Boyle Heights, California and now resides in McAllen, Texas with his wife and daughter.

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Fixed by a flash of incorruptible light

7/6/2020

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In search of parchment, indelibility

Excerpt from Meteors, a collection of poetry

by Robert René Galván


​GRAFFITI

​
Take this glowing script
As a burnt offering
Of chrism from my brow.
Midnight oil consumed
By the greedy darkness,
When my wick grows dim
And words become a relief
Of amoebic spectres
On the wall.

We are the same,
A whimsy of dancing hands,
Indigo faces in search
Of parchment,
Indelibility:

The stealth of youths
And the stench of sprayed
Rebellion in the trainyard,
A lover's vow scratched in oak,
Or in wet cement,
The bathroom bard,
Granite elegies,
Scars of melody on vinyl,
Frozen images on celluloid,
And shadows made fast on wafers
Of dead tree.​

My own strokes are engulfed
By solitude,
Like footprints on the moon.
They are faint adumbrations,
A sack of spores
Waiting to be strewn
From the folds
Of paper birds.
An earlier version of "GRAFFITI" appeared in Sands.
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Photo of the author with his abuelita Goya (Gregoria Arispe Galván), whose lighted sign reads: "Sr. G.A. Galván-Partera"
LA PARTERA

​
My grandmother's raisined hands
Guide a new life through the meniscus of sleep
and into the blinding day.

This has been her ritual for fifty years:

The phone rings --
The metallic music of her black bag
Answers back as she flies to a neighbor's house.
She prepares her fingers in boiled water
As if to coax sweetness out of those dried figs
And waits for the mother to blossom.

But this one's a breach,
Poised as if trying to break his fall, feet first.
Calmly, she finds the baby's mouth
With her finger;
He bares down to suckle
And she turns him toward the light.

Age and aches have not dissuaded her
For her room is filled
With reminders of her faith:

A statue of La Virgen,
Bottles of holy water
Among brittle blades of palm,
And countless gift rosaries
That grace the bedposts;

She caresses each pearl
And prays for stronger hands.
MEMORIAL


for  Woody  McGriff, dancer
1957-94

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed....
-- W.B. Yeats

​
An obsidian wing glanced my shoulder
Amid the languid trance of cicadas
Seething in the midday heat.

It fluttered like an errant leaf
And summoned the splendor of your dance,
Flight frozen like a Rodin bronze,
Fixed by a flash of incorruptible light.

But the heavy tide drew you under,
The once supple leaps reduced
To a lumber toward a distant sea.
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Robert René Galván, born in San Antonio, resides in New York City where he works as a professional musician and poet. His last collection of poems is entitled, Meteors, published by Lux Nova Press. His poetry was recently featured in Adelaide Literary Magazine, Azahares Literary Magazine, Gyroscope, Hawaii Review, Newtown Review, Panoply, Stillwater Review, West Texas Literary Review, and the Winter 2018 issue of UU World. He is a Shortlist Winner Nominee in the 2018 Adelaide Literary Award for Best Poem. Recently, his poems are featured in Puro ChicanX Writers of the 21st Century.  He was educated at Texas State University, SUNY Stony Brook and the University of Texas.

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Tonight is a history we can’t escape

6/9/2020

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Cover image: "Obstructed" by Guadalupe Ramirez

An excerpt from Phantom Tongue
by Steven Sanchez

Joshua Tree
 
Even with its trunk arched back
and boughs splayed out

like fingers extended from an open palm,
I’d never mistake this position for praise
 
though its name is biblical like my own: Steven--
the first man to die in God’s name, chosen
 
by my mother who didn’t want my name
to sound Mexican. Spanish is dirty,
 
dirty as the soil that insulates roots,
dirty as my left hand after writing
 
in pencil. And now, when I speak
to anybody in Spanish, I’m an imposter.
 
My thick accent breaks the legs
beneath each letter and leaves my words

disfigured like that first martyr
after he was stoned and whipped, his face tilted

toward the sky, warm blood escaping
his mouth, open and silent. 
What I Didn’t Tell You

                        —for my brother

You can ask me anything,
even about my first kiss,
which was at your age
and tasted like stale beer.
I used to feel guilty swallowing
the pulse of another man,
but now I know there are many
ways to pray.  There’s a name for
that most intimate prayer:
la petite mort—the little death.
If, when your lover rakes
your back, you recall
the flock of worshippers
surrounding you like raptors
when they learned you’re gay,
clawing at your shoulders,
squawking for salvation,
remind yourself you have to die
before you can be resurrected.
Never forget what the Bible says:
when two people worship together,
they create a church
no matter where they are--
which must include
the backseat of a car
or the darkest corner
of Woodward Park.
These are some of the things
I wanted to tell you
that night in April
you called me for help
with your history report
about the gay-rights movement.
Neither of us admitted
what he knew about the other.
Instead I started
with the ancient Greeks,
told you it was normal for them,
that for one brief moment
they were allowed to shape
their own history and religion,
organizing the stars, forming
Orion, for example,
flexing in the sky, arms
open in victory, belt
hanging below his waist.
But he was punished
for his confidence,
a scorpion’s hooked tail
piercing his body
like a poison moon.
When I see Orion,
I think of you and remember
what it felt like
for my knuckles to sink
into your stomach,
for my fist to collide
with your face.  Your voice,
your walk, your gestures
reminded me of myself,
your figure bright and fluid,
creating a reflection
I wanted to break.
And now I see
your body spill open--
Big Dipper hooked
to your ribs, North Star
nestled in the middle.
I reach for that ladle
and drink.
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Public altar in San Francisco honoring the 49 people killed at the Pulse nightclub.
The Gunman


            Orlando, June 12, 2016

Imagine:
            the four chambers of my heart
                                    each loaded with a bullet,
            each beat another revolution
                        in my chest,
my throat
            a barrel,
                        my curled tongue
                                                a trigger.
                        I believe
                                    in spirits,
in every fag
            and queer
                        I’ve heard
                                    and allowed
                                                to pass through my body
                        and into the next.
I believe
            in possession,
                        believe each metal slug
            entering our bodies
                                    tonight is a history
            we can’t escape,
                                    forged in factories
            across this country
                                                by men
                        who feel threatened
                                                            by love.
And when I stare
                        into my reflection
                                    one last time tonight,
            I know each pupil
will become an exit
                                    wound.
                                                I’ve spent my life
            learning to lie
                        to myself,
                                    but tonight
the truth
            will enter my body,
                        will hurt,
                                    will kill,
                                                will leave
an echo. 
PicturePhoto: Carmelo Rossette -- Et al. Photography
Steven Sanchez is the author of Phantom Tongue (Sundress Publications, 2018), chosen by Mark Doty for the Rochelle Ratner Memorial Award. He is a CantoMundo Fellow, Lambda Literary Fellow, and the inaugural winner of the Federico García Lorca Poetry Prize for an emerging Latinx poet. His poems have appeared in Agni, American Poetry Review, The Missouri Review, North American Review, Poet Lore, and elsewhere. ​

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SILENCE OR SUBTLETY IS NOT HER THING

7/23/2019

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Excerpts from The Canción Cannibal Cabaret, a performance work
By Amalia Ortiz

​From The Introduction


​The Making of a Revolution                                                          
Performance art does not subscribe to the tradition of
High Culture. It is revolutionary art.
                                                                                                           —Norman Denzin
​The Canción Cannibal Cabaret, a collection of poem songs and prose poems set in a post-apocalyptic future, tells the story of the revolutionary leader “La Madre Valiente” who aims to incite future revolutionaries to join in intersectional feminism and activism. After an environmental apocalypse, a refugee raised under an oppressive state, La Madre Valiente studies secretly to become the leader of a feminist revolution. Her emissaries, Black Bards and Red Heralds, roam the land reciting her story, educating, and enlisting allies in revolution. This is the premise of my punk musical.

…….
​
Questioning authority is at the heart of my work. Ultimately, The Canción Cannibal Cabaret constitutes the synthesis of much of my past work. It combines activism, politics, writing, music, performance, costumes, visual arts, and POC aesthetics. It also claims a rightful space in academia as the work of an educated woman of color. What this book cannot capture on paper is expressed in live performance. As Denzin explains, “We should treat performances as a complementary form of research publication.” Like Cynthia Cruz, I am skeptical of the literary world’s new, self-interested embrace of political poetry. As so many grapple with the question of how to move forward in the shadow of a presidency at war with the weakest, least able, and most marginalized among us, I also agree with her assessment that, “The solution is a drastic reimagining.” So suggests La Madre.

​From Poem Songs

​A Message from Las Hijas de la Madre

​Welcome, hijas y hombres. Welcome, fugees and flaggers. 
Welcome, bossholes, broadbacks, and boots on the ground.
​All you civilyoungs and warhorses who daily tow the line. Worm workers in low appointments and Elect allies alike.
​
If you have willingly broke curfew to secret meet and receive the herstory of La Madre Valiente, then we salute you. If any notes of this testimonio ring bona fide, we hope that you not bury these truth bones, but instead ingest them to your memory to spit up and feed others in times of need. So suggests La Madre. So, we swallowed herstory and hid it in the safest place where no law can destroy it—deep inside our own flesh where only death can pry it from us. And so, we now feed you the same nourishment once fed us. And you, when you are full enough to rock rebellion, can continue the song.
 
As a live performer trying to connect with people, obscuring meaning from an audience does not work. I see nothing wrong with clarity of meaning. But what I see as a strength in my work, other academics have labeled a weakness. These criticisms have not deterred me from trying to create a poetry that is above all else accessible. My poetics highlight the intersection of racial discrimination, poverty, and gender inequality impacting the lives and identities of people of color. I center and claim space for marginalized voices in my writing, therefore, it must be decidedly political and accessible.

As an activist artist, I believe art can inspire change. When I create art it is a selfish act. I feel immediate catharsis in sharing my art. Yet I also claim space for dialogue for other disempowered voices that do not have my luxury of an audience. My art is desperate. It is crude and angry and bleeding. It is didactic and loud because it cannot aff ord to go unheard. “Your silence will not protect you,” the great feminist poet Audre Lorde wrote in her rallying essay, “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action”:

Because the machine will try to grind you into dust anyway, whether or not we speak. We can sit in our corners mute forever while our sisters and ourselves are wasted, while our children are distorted and destroyed, while our earth is poisoned; we can sit in our safe corners mute as bottles, and we will still be no less afraid. (42)
Silence or subtlety will never be my choice.
​
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Las Hijas de la Madre

​Re Membering Herstory

In her domestic appointment in a home of the Elect, La Madre Valiente would slip out of her quarters at night to study a restricted device she had stolen away. This was how La Madre began to recover so many herstories lost to the State. Before the Pocked Eclipse, the learning was webfree, but those untangled herstories were burned or flooded during the Fall.

It was sometime after the death of her last son that La Madre Valiente began her recitation of the old folk songs. (Words on paper or the discovery of fugee use of devices is punished with expulsion from the State Gates.) And so, La Madre began to share herstory in secret.

She returned to the old folk songs and repeated them among the mothers and the colored. Her campaign spread faster than violence through the tenements. Her anger gained momentum, as the dark and poor women’s children suffered more than others. Even the Yardie gangs set aside their fracasos with one another to begin to fight for some- thing larger—perhaps true homes instead of block corners in State yards.
​
The herstories La Madre loved most—those that spread quickest through the tenements—were the songs of workers and mujeres past long before the Fall—old folk songs of fugees like us long forgotten.

​Rememory of Strange Fruit

     ​with thanks to Abel Meeropol and Toni Morrison
Strange fruit, not hanging but withering in crowded trucks— Loss is expected in transport. Drivers still get paid big bucks. Brown bodies praying for the pardon of our southern breeze— The south still produces strange fruit, just not entwined in trees.

If the fruit survives delivery, it can be bought and sold.
Market prices double if fruit is ripe and not too old. Dried and rotting in the desert, trampled falling off trains— Bondage continues in this land, though not with chains.

​Growers and traffickers supply consumer-demanded yields.
There’s a fortune to be made from strange fruit fertilizing fields.
Rememory of blood on leaves, rememory of blood at root— The profits from the bitter crop outweigh our losses of our strange, strange fruit.

​Nom de Guerre

You think because we are women we are weak, and maybe we are.  But only to a certain point… We can no longer remain quiet over these acts that fill us with rage. And so, I am an instrument who will take vengeance.         
  --Diana, Huntress of Bus Drivers
​                                     I eat the cries of the dead.
     I am a hunter               a huntress of men.
Some people think me a monster.
For others, fantasies of vengeance I foster.
​
                                    I am Diana the huntress.
We are Diana the huntress.

                                     I wear the moon on my head.
I am a hunter               a huntress of men, born in the barrio in a mass grave threatening to those holding chains to enslave

                                    I am Diana the huntress.
We are Diana the huntress.

                              Hello, from the gutters of Juárez.
Hello, from the slums of Mumbai.
Hello, from the brothels of Thailand. Hello, from sweat shops in LA.
You will know my name. You will know my name.

                                    Hello, Malala assassins.
Hello, Boko Haram.
Hello, from my Pussy Riot.
Hello, from my Gulabi Gang.

You will know my name. You will know my name.

                                  My hounds are free and unfed.
I am a hunter                 a huntress of men. My Wild Hunt’s broken loose— ghost riders crunching bones beneath their boots.

                                    I am Diana the huntress.
We are Diana the huntress.

                                                  Join me all you who have bled.
Become a hunter            a huntress of men.
Fight corruption.      Protect the powerless.
Left with no recourse, unleash your huntress.

                                     You are Diana the huntress.
Become Diana the huntress.

                                     Hello, from the classrooms of Yemen.
Hello, from Radical Monarchs.
Hello, my Arming Sisters. Hello, Hijas de Violencia.

They will know your names. They will know your names.

                                   Hello, auto-defensas.
Hello, Nevin Yildirim.
Hello, my Ovarian Psycos. Hello, to my Red Brigade.
                                                  And they will know your names.
They will know our names.
They will know my name. They will know my name.       
justice frozen in our crosshairs--
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​Amalia Leticia Ortiz is a Tejana actor, writer, and activist who appeared on three seasons of “Russell Simmons Presents Def Poetry” on HBO, and has toured colleges and universities as a solo artist and with performance-poetry troupes Diva Diction, The Chicano Messengers of Spoken Word, and the Def Poetry College Tour. The first of many other awards, her debut book of poetry, Rant. Chant. Chisme (Wings Press), won the 2015 Poetry Discovery Prize from the Writers’ League of Texas Book Awards and was selected by NBC Latino as one of the “10 Great Latino Books of 2015.”
The Canción Cannibal Cabaret is due for release July 27, 2019, in San Antonio, Texas. For more information and to purchase copies of the book, contact Aztlan Libre Press at: 
​editors@aztlanlibrepress.com and aztlanlibrepress.com.

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Violeta es la mañana sin preámbulos

11/20/2018

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​For Caraza, poetry, like the Greek and Roman gods of antiquity, is half-deity and half-force of nature. She communes with it—or, rather, it chooses to commune with her, and she wholeheartedly surrenders to its voice.
—Hector Luis Alamo


Un extracto de / An excerpt from Sin preámbulos / Without Preamble
Por / By Xánath Caraza
Traducido al inglés por Sandra Kingery / Translated into English by Sandra Kingery
​
Sin preámbulos

​Violeta es la mañana
sin preámbulos

se filtra la luz
en las grietas

se escurre el delirio
en los pétalos

saetas de color rompen
la superficie que tocan

tiñe aurora los recuerdos
polícroma melodía

violeta fue la luz
se desvanece

con la brisa
ráfaga de fuego

tiempo violeta
delinea la partida

tic-tac, tic-tac
tic-tac, tic-tac
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​Without Preamble

Violet is the morning
without preamble

light filtering
through crevasses

delirium sliding
down petals

colored arrows broaching
the surfaces they touch

polychrome melody
tinting memories dawn

violet was the light
it dissipates

with the breeze
bursts of flame

violet time
delineates the departure

tick-tock, tick-tock
tick-tock, tick-tock


Refulgente oleaje

Nacarada luz 
golpeas la intimidad
perforas la soledad.

Se arrastran luminosos rayos
en los pisos de piedra
canto lunar.

Inhalo el opalescente aroma
y descubro las manos
que fijan las letras.

Las sílabas intersecan
con los recuerdos
refulgente oleaje.

En el horizonte
la rutina invade
las páginas.

Las cadenas se abren.
Una lluvia de tinta
inunda el papel.

Glistening Waves

Pearly light
you strike privacy
puncture solitude.

Luminous rays crawl
across stone floors
lunar chorus.

I inhale opalescent aromas
and discover the hands
that deploy the alphabet.

Syllables intersect
with memories
glistening waves.

On the horizon
routine invades
the pages.

Chains open.
A shower of ink
inundates the paper.


Es la lluvia saturada de perlas

Sólo es la lluvia 
que perfora el mar.

Voz de fuego.

Llevo enredado
un collar de perlas

traídas de donde
nace el trueno.

Voz de agua.

Los tatuajes engañan
seducen las páginas.

Iguanas de oscura tinta
zurcidas en el papel.

Voz dolorosa.

El viento ulula llanto
es la lluvia saturada de perlas.
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​It is Rain Saturated with Pearls

Only the rain
pierces the sea.

Voice of fire.

I wear twisted
a necklace of pearls

obtained from where
the thunder is born.

Voice of water.

Tattoos deceive
pages seduce.

Iguanas of dark ink
mended on the page.

Dolorous voice.

The wind howls sobs
it is rain saturated with pearls.


Cenizas

Entierro las manos en el barro.
Guarda mi esencia.
El agua me rodea.

Isla de palabras sembrada de luz
donde las sílabas brotan.
Dadora de versos.

Ritmos luminosos en la montaña
sombras lunares dan vida
a mi silueta en esta isla.

Aquí enterré mi corazón.
Ulula, viento, espárceme.
Cenizas lunares renacen.

Ashes

I bury my hands in mud.
It preserves my essence.
Water surrounds me.

Island of words sown with light
where syllables sprout.
Giver of verses.

Luminous rhythms on the mountain
lunar shadows give life
to my silhouette on this island.

Here I buried my heart.
Howl, wind, scatter me.
Lunar ashes are reborn.
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​Xánath Caraza es viajera, educadora, poeta y narradora. Enseña en la Universidad de Missouri-Kansas City. Escribe para Seattle Escribe, La Bloga, Smithsonian Latino Center y Revista Literaria Monolito. Es Writer-in-Residence en Westchester Community College, Nueva York desde 2016. En 2018 recibió de los International Latino Book Awards primer lugar: “Mejor libro de poesía—un autor—español” por su poemario Lágrima roja y primer lugar: “Mejor libro de poesía—un autor—bilingüe” por su poemario Sin preámbulos. Su poemario Sílabas de viento recibió el2015 International Book Award de poesía. También recibió mención de honor como mejor libro de poesía en español por los International Latino Book Awards de 2015. En 2014 recibió la Beca Nebrija para Creadores del Instituto Franklin, Universidad de Alcalá de Henares en España. En 2013 fue nombrada número uno de los diez mejores autores latinos para leer por LatinoStories.com. Sus poemarios Donde la luz es violeta, Tinta negra, Ocelocíhuatl, Conjuro y su colección de relatos Lo que trae la marea han recibido reconocimientos nacionales e internacionales. Sus otros poemarios son Hudson, Le sillabe del vento, Noche de colibríes, Corazón pintado y su segunda colección de relatos,Metztli. Ha sido traducida al inglés, italiano y griego; y parcialmente traducida al náhuatl, portugués, hindi, turco y rumano.

Xánath Caraza is a traveler, educator, poet, and short story writer. She teaches at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. She writes for Seattle Escribe, La Bloga, The Smithsonian Latino Center, and Revista Literaria Monolito. She is Writer-in-Residence at Westchester Community College, New York since 2016. In 2018 for the International Latino Book Awards she received First Place for Lágrimaroja for “Best Book of Poetry in Spanish by One Author” and First Place for Sin preámbulos / Without Preamble for “Best Book of Bilingual Poetry by One Author.”  Her book of poetry Syllables of Wind/ Sílabas de viento received the 2015 International Book Award for Poetry. It also received Honorable Mention for best book of Poetry in Spanish in the 2015 International Latino Book Awards. Caraza was the recipient of the 2014 Beca Nebrija para Creadores, Universidad de Alcalá de Henares in Spain. She was named number one of the 2013 Top Ten Latino Authors by LatinoStories.com. Her books of verseWhere the Light is Violet, Black Ink, Ocelocíhuatl, Conjuro and her book of short fiction What the Tide Brings have won national and international recognition. Her other books of poetry are Hudson, Le sillabe del vento, Noche de colibríes, Corazón pintado, and her second short story collection, Metztli. Caraza has been translated into English, Italian, and Greek; and partially translated into Nahuatl, Portuguese, Hindi, Turkish, and Rumanian.

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He died. He lived. He dies. He lives.

1/1/2017

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​Poems 
of resistance 
and hope

​Excerpts from Vivas to Those Who Have Failed

By Martín Espada


The Right Foot of Juan de Oñate

On the road to Taos, in the town of Alcalde, the bronze statue
of Juan de Oñate, the conquistador, kept vigil from his horse.
Late one night a chainsaw sliced off his right foot, stuttering
through the  ball of his ankle, as Oñate’s spirit scratched
and howled like a dog trapped within the bronze body.

Four centuries ago, after his cannon fire burst to burn hundreds
of bodies and blacken the adobe walls of the Acoma Pueblo,
Oñate wheeled on his startled horse and spoke the decree:
all Acoma males above the age of twenty-five would be punished
by amputation of the right foot. Spanish knives sawed through ankles;
Spanish hands tossed feet into piles like fish at the marketplace.
There was prayer and wailing in a language Oñate did not speak.

Now, at the airport in El Paso, across the river from Juárez,
another bronze statue of Oñate rises on a horse frozen in fury.
The city fathers smash champagne bottles across the horse’s legs
to christen the statue, and Oñate’s spirit remembers the chainsaw
carving through the ball of his ankle. The Acoma Pueblo still stands.


Thousands of brown feet walk across the border, the desert
of Chihuahua, the shallow places of the Río Grande, the bridges
from Juárez to El Paso. Oñate keeps watch, high on horseback
above the Río Grande, the law of the conquistador rolled
in his hand, helpless as a man with an amputated foot,
spirit scratching and howling like a dog within the bronze body. 
Picture
En la esquina
​Photo by Frank Espada
The Puerto Rican Diaspora Documentary Project, 1979-81

Heal the Cracks in the Bell of the World

For the community of Newtown, Connecticut, where twenty
students and six educators lost their lives to a gunman at 
Sandy Hook Elementary School, December 14, 2012

​Now the bells speak with their tongues of bronze.
Now the bells open their mouths of bronze to say:
Listen to the bells a world away. Listen to the bell in the ruins
of a city where children gathered copper shells like beach glass,
and the copper boiled in the foundry, and the bell born
in the foundry says: I was born of bullets, but now I sing
of a world where bullets melt into bells.  Listen to the bell
in a city where cannons from the armies of the Great War
sank into molten metal bubbling like a vat of chocolate,
and the many mouths that once spoke the tongue of smoke
form the one mouth of a bell that says: I was born of cannons,
but now I sing of a world where cannons melt into bells.

Listen to the bells in a town with a flagpole on Main Street,
a rooster weathervane keeping watch atop the Meeting House,
the congregation gathering to sing in times of great silence.
Here the bells rock their heads of bronze as if to say:
Melt the bullets into bells, melt the bullets into bells.
Here the bells raise their heavy heads as if to say:
Melt the cannons into bells, melt the cannons into bells.
Here the bells sing of a world where weapons crumble deep
in the earth,  and no one remembers where they were buried.
Now the bells pass the word at midnight in the ancient language
of bronze, from bell to bell,  like ships smuggling news of liberation
from island to island, the song rippling through the clouds.

Now the bells chime like the muscle beating in every chest,
heal the cracks in the bell of every face listening to the bells. 
The chimes heal the cracks in the bell of the moon.
The chimes heal the cracks in the bell of the world. 
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Young Man Holding Puerto Rican Flag
Photo by Frank Espada
The Puerto Rican Diaspora Documentary Project, 1979-81
Picture
Martín and his father, Frank Espada, 1964

El Moriviví

 For Frank Espada (1930-2014)
​The Spanish means: I died, I lived. In Puerto Rico, the leaves
of el moriviví close in the dark and open at first light.
The fronds curl at a finger’s touch and then unfurl again.
My father, a mountain born of mountains, the tallest
Puerto Rican in New York, who scraped doorways,
who could crack the walls with the rumble of his voice,
kept a moriviví growing in his ribs. He would die, then live.

My father spoke in the tongue of el moriviví, teaching me
the parable of Joe Fleming, who screwed his lit cigarette
into the arms of the spics he caught, flapping like fish.
My father was a bony boy, the nerves in his back
crushed by the Aiello Coal and Ice Company, the load
he lifted up too many flights of stairs.  Three times
they would meet to brawl for a crowd after school.
The first time, my father opened his eyes to gravel
and the shoes of his enemy. The second time, he rose
and dug his arm up to the elbow in the monster’s belly,
so badly did he want to tear out the heart and eat it.
The third time, Fleming did not show up, and the boys
with cigarette burns clapped their spindly champion 
on the back, all the way down the street. Fleming would
become a cop, fired for breaking bones in too many faces.
He died smoking in bed, a sheet of flame up to his chin.

There was a moriviví sprouting in my father’s chest. He would die, 
then live.  He spat obscenities like sunflower seeds at the driver
who told him to sit at the back of the bus  in Mississippi, then
slipped his cap over his eyes and fell asleep. He spent a week in jail, 
called it the best week  of his life, strode through the jailhouse door
and sat behind the driver of the bus on the way out of town,
his Air Force uniform all that kept the noose from his neck.
He would come to know the jailhouse again, among hundreds
of demonstrators ferried by police to Hart Island on the East River,
where the city of New York stacks the coffins of anonymous
and stillborn bodies. Here, Confederate prisoners once wept
for the Stars and Bars; now, the prisoners sang Freedom Songs.

The jailers outlawed phone calls, so we were sure my father must be
a body like the bodies rolling waterlogged in the East River, till he came
back from the island of the dead,  black hair combed meticulously.
When the riots burned in Brooklyn night after night, my father
was a peacemaker on the corner with a megaphone.  A fiery
chunk of concrete fell from the sky and missed his head by inches. 
My mother would tell me: Your father is out dodging bullets.
He spoke at a rally with Malcolm X, incantatory words
billowing through the bundled crowd, lifting hands and faces.
Teach, they cried. My father clicked a photograph of Malcolm
as he bent to hear a question, finger pressed against the chin.
Two months later the assassins stampeded the crowd
to shoot Malcolm, blood leaping from his chest as he fell.
My father would die too, but then he would live again,
after every riot, every rally, every arrest, every night in jail,
the change from his pockets landing hard on the dresser
at 4 AM every time I swore he was gone for good.

My father knew the secrets of el moriviví, that he would die,
then live. He drifted off at the wheel, drove into a guardrail,
shook his head and walked away without a web of scars
or fractures. He passed out from the heat in the subway,
toppled onto the tracks, and somehow missed the third rail.
He tied a white apron across his waist to open a grocery store,
pulled a revolver from the counter to startle the gangsters 
demanding protection, then put up signs for a clearance sale
as soon as they backed out the door with their hands in the air. 
When the family finally took a vacation in the mountains
of the Hudson Valley, a hotel with waiters in white jackets
and white paint peeling in the room, the roof exploded
in flame, as if the ghost of Joe Fleming and his cigarette
trailed us everywhere, and it was then that my father
appeared in the smoke, like a general leading the charge
in battle, shouting commands at the volunteer fire company, 
steering the water from the hoses, since he was immune
to death by fire or water, as if he wore the crumbled leaves
of el moriviví in an amulet slung around his neck.

My brother called to say el moriviví was gone. My father tore
at the wires, the electrodes, the IV, saying that he wanted
to go home.  The hospital was a jailhouse in Mississippi.
The furious pulse that fired his heart in every fight flooded
the chambers of his heart. The doctors scrutinized the film,
the grainy shadows and the light, but could never see: my father
was a moriviví. I died. I lived. He died. He lived. He dies. He lives.
PicturePhoto by David González
​Martín Espada was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1957. He has published almost twenty books as a poet, editor, essayist and translator. His new collection of poems from Norton is calledVivas to Those Who Have Failed (2016). Other books of poems include The Trouble Ball (2011), The Republic of Poetry (2006),Alabanza (2003), A Mayan Astronomer in Hell’s Kitchen (2000),Imagine the Angels of Bread (1996), City of Coughing and Dead Radiators (1993) and Rebellion is the Circle of a Lover’s Hands(1990). His many honors include the Shelley Memorial Award, the Robert Creeley Award, the National Hispanic Cultural Center Literary Award, an American Book Award, the PEN/Revson Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship. The Republic of Poetry was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. The title poem of his collection Alabanza, about 9/11, has been widely anthologized and performed. His book of essays, Zapata’s Disciple (1998), was banned in Tucson as part of the Mexican-American Studies Program outlawed by the state of Arizona, and will be issued in a new edition by Northwestern University Press. A former tenant lawyer in Greater Boston’s Latino community, Espada is a professor of English at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.

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