Pilgrim
​
See, some were born to summer homes
And palatial groves
Where pain was only to ever unfold
From the pages of Secret Gardens
Where the Red Fern Grows
But not I
See, I come from the stock
Of starry-eyed astronauts
Who greet the night sky
With big dreams and wide eyes
Always Running
Down the Devil’s Highway
Through Occupied America
On the way back to
The House on Mango Street
And all those other books
You didn’t want us to read
Raised on handball
Off the back wall
Of a panaderia
Born
East the river
Post Mendez vs Westminster
One generation removed
From the redlines
And diplomas signed
That those dreams
In that skin
Need not apply
See, I come from struggle
And if my story offends you
That is only ‘cause you made the mistake of seeking your
reflection
In my self-portrait
See, this
Well this may not be about you
Because while some were born
To the common core
Whose reflected faces
Graced the pages
Of doctrines to discover
And ages to be explored
Where old world hardships
Crashed against new shores
New England
New Hampshire
New Jersey
New York
For others pushed off
Turtle island
Aztlan
Do not call this brown skin immigrant
Child of the sun
Son of the conquest
Mexicano blood
Running through the veins
Of the eastside of Los Angeles
Do not tell him
In what native tongue
His song would best be sung
Do not tell me
Who I am
‘Cause I was raised just like you
Miseducated in some of those
Very same schools
Off lessons and legends
Of honest injuns and Christian pilgrims
And a nation of immigrants
All united in freedom
That is until they pulled aside
My white friend
Pointed directly at me
And said “Scott
I judge you by the company you keep
And you spend your time with this”
And that’s the same old story since 1846
The adventures of Uncle Sam
The stick-up man
Hey wetback
Show me your papers
Now give me your labor
The Melting Pot
Was never meant for the hands
That clean it
The American dream
Has always come at the expense
Of those who tucked it in
And you don’t know that
‘Cause you don’t teach it
Could write you a book
But you won’t read it
So you know what
This is about you
And 1492
And the treaty of Guadalupe
California missions
And Arizona schools
And these racists
That try to erase us
As we raise their kids
In cities that bear our names
But you’re going to learn
Something today
‘Cause from Ferdinand
To minuteman
From Arpaio
To Alamo
From Popol Vuh
To Yo Soy Joaquin
To the Indian that still lives in me
From Mexico 68
To the missing 43
They tried to bury us
They didn’t know we were seeds
From Cananea mine
To Delano strike
From the Plan De Ayala
Emiliano Zapata
Joaquin Murrieta
Las Adelitas
Brown Berets
And Zapatistas
From Richard Nixon
To the Third Napoleon
From Peckinpah
To Houston
From Lone Star Republic
To Christopher Columbus
All the way down
To Donald fucking Trump
We didn’t cross the borders
The borders crossed us
Who you calling immigrant
Pilgrim?

Carved Over
​
Draw a map
Line the sand
Carve the desert
Act on land
Amend it
Eminent domain
Indefinite detention
Private prisons
Public referendum
Gentrification
Naturalization
Americanization
Forced sterilization
Make America Great Again
Mexico will pay
The hunt for Murrieta
The hunt for Pancho Villa
John Pershing’s slaughter of the innocents
A severed head
Touring California museums
Becomes Zorro
Becomes the Wild Bunch
Becomes whitewash
This American Life
Experience
Its imagination
If you can dream it
You can see it
And if you can see it
You can build it
And if you build it
You can take it
And if they resist
Manifest a cruelty
So complete
That for generations
They will do it to themselves
Build a city
Draw its borders
Patrol its districts
Add silence to injury
Insult without memory
Protect these borders
From language and culture
Taco trucks
And Dora the Explorer
The country is changing
And you know it
It’s simple mathematics
And you know it
You have kept us weak
By keeping us confused
Your grandchildren
Will speak Spanglish
In the neighborhood
You grew up in
Greeting their friends
On the corner
Of your childhood
And cherished memories
Under the lamplight
And faded midst
This historic site
Of your first kiss
Where you learned
To sink
Before you learned to swim
Where you
And she
Carved your names to trees
And promised each other
Forever
But
Memories fade
Neighborhoods change
And your names will be carved over
And there is nothing
You can do about it
And you know this too
So when Donald Trump
Says drug dealers and rapists
And Kelly Osbourne jumps in
To correct him
No Donald
Those people are just here to clean our shit
When you
Sit so comfortably
Speak so freely
About a group of people
Who are somehow everywhere
Yet at the same time
No one
Hold your tongue
We are far closer than you know

​Review by Scott Duncan-Fernandez
​
​
We Chicanos still need words to express our occupied experience even after 173 years. Mowing Leaves of Grass by Matt Sedillo has those words, slings out the curses to whomever has it coming. That necessary verbal retaliation of humanity that brown bodies and minds need. Social justice and history books are great, but we live in and by poetry.
​
I’m a Xicano, these words are for me, speak for me. I am impressed how much work Chicano art accomplishes: our art is functional. Sedillo’s Mowing Leaves of Grass lives up to this. You may find yourself in the work, in this too personal political experience of being Xicano in America, or you may come to understand the experience better as fellow human beings.

I’ve lived the poem, “A Chicano in Liverpool,” when the poet is asked do you belong here, though as a Chicano in Brighton, UK. My family and I have been, “Carved Over,” contended with fantasies about us and told we don’t belong in our homeland.
I’m sure many folks have commented on the title, Mowing Leaves of Grass, a reference to Mr. Body Electric. I liked studying him in high school and college, but never forgot what soured the milk: Whitman’s excitable thoughts that the Mexican-American War would be the fulfillment of Anglo superiority. In this education system we Chicanos are often forced to study and agree wholeheartedly with statements, literary works, and famous authors that advocate for our troglodyte inherency to servitude or how we are better off dead.

For all his exalting of the body electric, WW ain’t talking about my brown body or African bodies. White bodies need only apply for the full body kung fu glow in his world. Of course, they didn’t teach his thoughts on the matter in high school or college. The American school system likes to sanitize and exculpate northern Europeans, call slaves workers, say the land was empty and just waiting for development, that Mexicans were too lazy here in the underpopulated and underfunded frontier to get anything done. What more proof of this white supremacy than the current Texas Legislature’s further attempt to whitewash history and combat the truth of black and brown humanity and that the system built on us is oppressive and wrong.

I’m quite okay with Whitman getting mowed along with much of the American literary canon, the Anglocentric selection of works that academia advertises and empowers by its own authority.

Mowing Leaves of Grass is a cry against the American experience and for the Indigenous American, one often we Chicanos must steal back as our detractors use the earlier marks of Spanish conquest against us, or make exploitative tourist fantasies of us, as mentioned in “Carved Over.” This poem is a mental overthrow of the USA’s colonial idea of us as foreigners which is accomplished as well in the poem, “Pilgrim.” This poem “Pilgrim” was read at the first Aztlán Report, a state of the raza yearly event started this year in 2021. The Aztlán Report was a gathering of Chicano organizations to inform about the events and activities of the year pertinent the Mexican American experience. I attended as a member of MeXicanos 2070, a non-profit Chicano organization dedicated to protecting and enhancing our culture. A perfect setting for this counter colonial poem.

These poems come from a year ago, el tiempo de naranja, the time of Trump. Sedillo cusses Trump, cusses his followers. Points out that we Xicanos are the future.  Mowing Leaves of Grass, the book and the titular poem is mowing the canon, decolonizing the mind of education, American education. At times, it hits the same note, the note of resistance, but we are offered some poems like “La Reina,” where it’s a celebration of women who have persevered and transmitted culture, like my birth city of LA itself. 

We need more than witnessing to provide trauma porn for salivating masters, or equally legless rage to amuse them.  We don’t have anger issues, we got reasons to be angry. We need that emotion and reason, the chants and incantation in this collection that will heal and forge us. We need to be out of control and have un-colonial thoughts.

We deserve our anger; we need to express it. I needed these words when cops approached me as a teenager, guns on me, asked, are you a wetback? and slammed me against my car. I just knew “Fuck Tha Police” by NWA back then.  Now I have the poem, “Custers.” Mowing Leaves of Grass has many stanzas expressing the “ya bastas,” “nada mas,” “best back ups” that Chicanos need.

These poems are angry. I am angry. As I write this, Mario Gonzales is dead, murdered by cops, called on by neighbors for being tall and brown in a public park. He had long hair, the caller said; he looked “Hispanic” or “Indian.” The words describe Mario, me, and the poet. These poems can’t not be personal.

I want everyone to read this. It’s poetry for now, but not limited to it. Mow the canon, celebrate the Xicano electric or find the new words we are on the cusp of speaking thanks to fearless poetry like Sedillo’s.

JoAnn Anglin

THE POET:
​IN HER OWN WORDS

CHILDHOOD AND ADOLESCENCE
​
​I think I was just under 3 years old, and already had 2 younger sisters, and we lived in Bremerton, Washington. My Dad was a truck driver. We were all three baby girls in a small, crowded room — it could even have been some kind of back porch, it was very light, sunny. I was standing in my crib, and my dad came in. I recall him looking at us, smiling in delight, as if he was thinking, Look at what I’ve created!
​
All my memories of those early years, up until the time I was around 11 years old, are pretty good. Due to the Second World War, we did some moving around. My dad was drafted into the Navy, so my mom took us back to their home area of South Dakota, where we lived with her parents for a while out in the country. Then my dad was stationed at Treasure Island and we came out here and lived in Hayward for a while. My mom was fine with driving back and forth cross country. Once he shipped out, she moved to Sacramento; we lived in the garage of an old friend of hers who rounded up beds and cribs for us.

My dad was probably a bigger influence on me than my mom. Later, some of my first poems would be about him. We had good conversations and he always paid more attention to what was going on in the world. I am a feminist, but always interested to hear the male point of view.

I don’t write about those specific locations, but I do realize that I became an observer at an early age, Some might find this now hard to believe, but I was a pretty quiet kid and on the shy side. Usually very obedient. We were strong on rule-following. I can look back at all those years like a slide show, scene after scene, in my head.

Going to school was where I became more outgoing. They were Catholic parochial schools from 1st grade through high school. At first, we lived in public housing. In retrospect, it was kind of dumpy, but with a post-war housing shortage, everyone was in the same boat. This was before the days of air conditioning, and the insides were small and crowded, so we all spent a lot of time outside. I walked through Southside Park to get to Holy Angels School, and we played at the park. Before I started school, my mom taught me how to print my name. I was satisfied to spend a lot of time on my own. I wasn’t rebellious, but I was pretty independent.

In 3rd Grade, with my dad’s VA-FHA loan they bought a house in a little subdivision, with railroad tracks and empty fields around us.

I think the religious sisters who taught in our schools were okay, but favored well-behaved girls. In those days of corporal punishment, even I got my hands whacked with a ruler a few times. But the boys got the worst of it. Even worse, in our school at least, there were often 50 or more kids to a classroom. One thing my sisters and I recall is that there was no sharp demarcation between not-reading and reading. It was just something we flowed into, like a creek into a river.

Also, we were strict-practicing Catholics. It’s almost 50 years since I left the church, but I have a great sympathy for writing that includes spiritual aspect, including the idea of mystery. And many of my poems directly or indirectly refer to Catholic terminology or ceremonial practice.  

About age 10 or 11, I read a lot and loved movies and wanted to make my own stories. Of course I didn’t understand about plot or structure, so the stories might start with a description of a heroine, but then just trail off with no conclusion

I loved words for as long as I can remember, and would read everything, breakfast cereal boxes to comic books to Reader’s Digest. I read the newspaper funnies and, before long, some articles and letters to the editor. In high school I wrote some letters to the editor myself.

I generally got good grades, but don’t recall creativity being encouraged. The emphasis was on learning the correct answers and responses, especially related to the catechism. But I will always be grateful to Sister Mercy in 7th and 8th grades for giving credit for poetry memorization.

We were part of the pre-Boomer generation, my friends and I would create little skits or dances and might perform them at lunch time on rainy days when we had to stay in the classroom. I didn’t know anyone who took piano lessons, although I took tap lessons for a few years. I would add that I was very daydreamy, but that fantasizing didn’t get written down much.

During elementary school, drawing was a more usual artistic outlet for me. The topic of fairness was on my mind from an early age. This would come up in my assignments for speech or debate classes. And I always wished to have more beauty in my life. I also saw life as struggle and that often surfaces in my writing.  

In high school, after turning in some essay assignments, I was recruited to be editor of my school paper. I became deeply involved in all kinds of writing then — interviews, reviews, profiles, etc., and also began to understand about layout and some basics of journalism. This was never seen as a real career prep, though, just an extracurricular activity.

POEMS 

Easter 1999, to my Dad 

​I’m thinking of you and thinking of Mom,
And many Easters now long gone;
Thinking of eggs and candy rabbits,
Of jelly beans and pastel baskets,
Of Lenten churches, purple-clad,
And Easter pancakes we sometimes had.

From out of the house, we’d all of us file
And into the old green Plymouth pile.
Some of us sang then, in the choir
While showing off our new attire – 
Our shiny shoes and new straw hats
– and briefly put aside our spats.

I remember those days, and I’m glad we had ‘em;
Memories that can still warm and gladden.

Now, thinking of flowers and alleluia,
Again I wish Happy Easter to you!

Neri’s Sculpture: “Nude”   (Written sometime in the late ‘90s)

She isn’t whole, doesn’t know if she 
ever will be. Since her shatter, she has started 
to disappear. Her once-strong edges
of sweeping curves, elegant angles

demarcated her world. Sometimes she 
misses what was solid, sometimes not. 
Unexpected barbs cannot hook 
her now, nor tear her substance. 

As the abrupt world flows around her 
shards of her being chip off. She is amazed 
at what can pass through.
Once somebody’s memory, now a faded 

dream of essence that uses space, shifts,
casts shadows. Exquisite tension holds 
the stones of her in shapely structure,
a cairn. She tries to move in fluid shimmer

gatherer of river gravels that lead to dissolve,
shuffling rocks that glint and reflect what pours 
into yet never fills her. Somehow the shaky 
sculpture keeps moving forward.

She is seen as through frosted glass,
and knows well the force of her yearning, 
but not whether she yearns to be whole  
or to fully dissolve.

The Chagall Lovers   October 2003
  (Written for Arturo and Christina Mantecon)

Ascending each evening, they float in the sky
drawn up by kisses and each other’s eyes.

We hold our breaths, but they are buoyed up
above city streets on thermals of love

Their bouquets trail petals marking their flight
through satin blue evenings of levitation

They stair step the roofs in the forest of dusk
glisten as moon rise whispers its secrets

And gaze past their radiant halo songs
to stars chiming softly in heaven’s seas

Tender as tulips emerging from earth
they hold each other in night sky gardens

Up there with fiddlers and gods and devils
dancing with goats and calves and doves

Nourished on scents from the orange trees below
veiled in the rapture of fortunate love

Their hands round the necks of roosters and
horses, tangled in garlands braided in manes,

The town beneath is a chorus of wishes 
that rise up like bubbles, like scarlet balloons. 

They smile. They smile at gravity
that has nothing to do with them.

Secrets of a Babysitter

As if she were a robot with no curiosity,
They wave themselves away

Sure she has homework, they say it’s okay
To have some snacks or use the telephone.

She bathes the children, reads to them
Spoons ice cream into slack pink mouths.

Once they are in bed, she eyes drawer pulls
And door handles, cupboards and latches

She knows where the crème de menthe
Sits stickily on the pantry shelf

Where the glossy Polaroids are kept 
In the back of the lingerie drawer

While children sleep she fingers coupons
Foreign coins and keys in the kitchen drawer

Examines paperback books, CDs and videos 
Turns album pages, sits at the computer

Shakes each pill bottle in the medicine cabinet
Removes and pockets one from each prescription.

Sprays herself with golden scents from a mirrored 
Tray, slips on a silky camisole that skims her nipples

Smacks her lips as she tries on lipstick in shades
She’d never wear, wonders at its fruity, slippery taste.

The News   March 2007 

No news is not good news
No news means something is 
in a gather of foreboding, lurks
under snarled brush, just beyond
the darkened horizon.

No news means a smudge on the old
photograph, a missed chance to 
reclaim that patient sepia image.
Stains only worsen when rubbed.
To fray lacks the order of ravel.

There was a song, a vinyl record,
a larkish trill of hope rising, 
now scratched by disregard.
Something once held with care
set now among danger.

Imagination both helps and hurts.
News keeps breaking into or out.  
Patch the shattering — tape or spackle
may soften the force, but it comes. 
Seepage will enter, its outline remain.

Boy’s Ranch   November 2010

Before you arrive at the gate,
you have wound through the
clefts of pale yellow hills.

You have seen flocks — wild turkeys, 
then Canada geese — and shallow pools 
reflecting blue skies. Further, like old

men, crouched turkey vultures 
pause in their pavement feast. 
Beyond fences: cattle, tilting trees. 

Drive on through the oak grove where 
a loping coyote stares back. The gate arm 
lifts, lets you pass. Not such a bad place, 

you say at the last curve, as jays and
woodpeckers fly through the double rolls of 
razor wire atop the 20-foot steel fence.

My To-Do List   April 2013

I checked off the decision to
have two failed marriages.
And children who lacked confidence
in me: checked. The pet dog
who ate the poison. Checked. 
There was the boss who made me cry.
Check. The one who made me crazy.
Check. Plumbing that corroded, 
beloved serving dish that broke. Check.

Wrong turn that took me out
of my way for two years. Check.  
Many checks for arguments on
religion, race, sex, politics.
Laughing in the wrong place. Saying
Yes, saying No. Saying too much.
Not enough. Check, and check.
Unfiled income tax. What I owe family,
former lovers. All checked off.
Sleeping one more time with that man.
Not sleeping with another. Saying 
I’m sorry too often. Double checks.
Saying ‘sleeping with’ instead of sex. 

Saving the money, getting the
cheapest substitute. Oh yeah, check.
Fearing dogs and horses. Check.
Smoking, check. Being persuaded, 
checked off again. In heavy ink.
The days I don’t know who I am.
Or why. Checking. Then, checking in 
too late. Checking out too soon.  ​

PLÁTICA: JoAnn Anglin (JAA) and Lucha Corpi (LC)
in Conversation:
 
LC: By circumstance, being an immigrant wife in the Bay Area, having no family here, being the mother of a young child, and years later going through a divorce, I began to write just as an exercise on spiritual and mental survival. I needed to know who I had become after getting married, and coming to the U.S. So many questions I had to find answers to. I felt that putting my feelings and life experience in the U.S. in writing would help me to make sense of my life and survive emotionally. It did. And I discovered I was a poet and writer in the process. You’ve told me the following about your beginnings as a writer:

JAA: We had no creative writing classes (in high school), no literary journals. On my own I wrote poems, which I rarely showed, and song lyrics which I never showed. These were mostly imitative of popular music, show tunes, or church hymns. It would take community college to really open my mind and awareness of other creative or philosophical paths.

My reading expanded, sometimes via assignments, and sometimes from recommendations from other students. Sometimes at home, I would want to talk about the reading, much as I’d liked to retell the movie stories when younger, but my interests made me the ‘odd duck’ in the family.  
 
LC: Was there a mentor/Teacher? Other poets at the time, from whom you learned your craft?

JAA: I wish I could say yes. One community college English teacher, Margaret Harrison, saw potential in me. I can see this looking back. She wanted me to apply to Holy Names College in the Bay Area, but I was positive this wasn’t something my family could afford. I knew nothing of scholarships, loans, or work-study. I didn’t see a way. I never saw a counselor. I soon dropped classes so I could work and afford a (junky) car. I even went to the draft office of the Navy, but was discouraged from joining. By age 20, I was married and pregnant. My husband’s story was similar. Later, after divorcing, we both finished college, me graduating with my BA at age 41!  
 
LC: You are a member of Escritores del Nuevo Sol group in the Sacramento area. Later you and some of the poets in Escritores also became members of Círculo de Poetas y Escritores in Oakland and the East Bay Area, including Santa Cruz. The late Francisco X. Alarcón was instrumental in establishing both organizations. As a matter of fact, I was invited by Francisco to attend a workshop-meeting of Escritores. I met many of you there. I was very impressed with the group. I am also very impressed with Círculo de Poetas y Escritores members:

Could you share how and when you and Francisco X. Alarcón met?

JAA: I have to give huge credit to La Raza Galeria Posada, the Latino Art Center in Sacramento. I became aware of their work when I was a public information officer for seven years at the California Arts Council. At the time, I knew vaguely of the Royal Chicano Air Force, the Chicano artists group, and of José Montoya and Esteban Villa. A couple of my co-workers were the artists Juan Carrillo and Loraine Garcia, and also Tere Romo and Josie Talamantez, so my consciousness was really being raised in this area. 

I began going to public LRGP events, one of them a poetry reading, organized by Galeria board members Art Mantecón and Francisco Alarcón. At the reading, Francisco announced the decision to start a writers’ group, the Taller Literario. The next week I called Tere Romo who became the Galeria director and curator. I asked if I could join, although I’m not Latino. Her answer: of course! Later the name was changed because people were confused by the word Taller when wrongly interpreted as referring to height. 

As I recall, Francisco and Art came up with the name of Los Escritores del Nuevo Sol, mainly because of Francisco’s fascination with the Aztec calendar. José Montoya stressed to us the need for preserving Latino arts and literature. We met monthly at LRGP, eventually having public poetry readings, usually related to major holidays – Mother’s Day, Day of the Dead, and such. When the Galeria went through some major inner turmoil, we began to meet at members’ homes. 

I cannot give enough credit and praise to Francisco Alarcón. Whether personally, socially, in poetry, or in politics, he was the most generous, kind, and forgiving person I have ever known. And I still remain in awe of his talent and energy. I believe that he was at times subjected to prejudice due to his accent or to his being gay. If he felt bitter about it, he never turned that bitterness on anyone else. Like others who knew him, I will never stop missing him. 

When the Crocker Art Museum hosted the Latino art exhibit, Our America, he invited several of our most active Escritores to be part of a project of ekphrastic art – each participant choosing a painting to inspire a piece of poetry. He also drew on his friendship with and knowledge of poets throughout California, particularly the Bay Area, which led to the positive interactions among the two areas. Some, reluctant to let the interaction fade, later founded the Círculo. We continue to be enriched by it. 

LC: How has (or not) being in the workshop helped you focus on your poetry in a more productive way?

JAA: One major thing: my membership in Los Escritores made me realize that my aptitude was for poetry, not fiction. We took turns facilitating exercises at our meetings, and I began to understand better the difference between words spoken and words on the page. Sometimes I’d bring a poem to read, and realize as I read it that segments of it, or just one word, didn’t really work. One of those exercises, by the way, was to give human personality to a non-human object. Francisco’s poem was called “Laughing Tomatoes,” which inspired him to write a series of related poems and became the title of his first children’s book. He also urged us to put together our first anthology of writing by Los Escritores. 
 
LC: I love your “My to do list,” poem. Do you remember what you were doing when the muse showed up? What was the first line, the first imagined “when”?

JAA: Thank you! Interesting that you refer to the muse. I recently read a writer’s comment that if you wait for the muse, you will never write. However, that poem did come to me more easily than most. I would say that the more you write, the more you will be able to write. In this case, I had made an off-hand jokey remark about something that I’d have to put on my To Do list, and then that the list was pretty long. I followed that train of thought and the poem came together rather quickly, with fewer drafts than usual. Audiences always like it, too. 
 
LC: As a published poet, what advice would you give to younger poets who are just beginning to make their poetry known and establish their authorship?

JAA: Write a lot and submit a lot. Read your work at open mics. Read what others are writing. Anthologies are wonderful for this. Do not be discouraged by rejection. It may or may not mean your poem needs more work. Often you will realize that your poem wasn’t quite right for one publication, but will be perfect for another. I have heard of poets submitting a particular poem dozens of times before it’s accepted.
 
I had an instructive exchange at a writing conference a few years ago. During a break, somebody next to me at a table heard I was from Sacramento. An editor, she asked me if I knew Indigo Moor. (He later became our poet laureate.) She said, He’s a wonderful writer. She had been a judge in a contest he submitted to. He hadn’t won the contest, but his name had become familiar to several people who would be paying attention next time his poems came across their submissions desk. 

SHORT BIO

JoAnn Anglin has taught poetry writing in schools, at Shriners’ Children’s Hospital, for a program with Crocker Art Museum, at a senior facility, and most recently, for 8 years at California State Prison, Sacramento (New Folsom).  

JoAnn received a District Arts Award from the Sacramento City Council and the Sacramento County Board of Supervisors. A coach for 10 years for Poetry Out Loud, she is a member of California Poets in the Schools (CPITS), the Sacramento Poetry Center, the Círculo des Poetas y Escritores, and Los Escritores del Nuevo Sol/Writers of the New Sun. Several journals and anthologies have included her poems, most recently, The Los Angeles Review of Books.

LC: Also, are you participating in any programs/readings in the area in the near future? How can people contact you about future programs and presentations? Do you have a newsletter? E-mail? Please tell:

JAA: The pandemic has pretty much stopped everything for now, although I’m encouraged with what people are doing via the ZOOM platform. A local publisher, 3 Bean Press, published my chapbook Heat in late January. I had one reading, and another scheduled, when everything was shut down. My work at the prison is now being done in a remote learning format and I really miss the in-class participation. Once the world evolves into whatever new shape it takes, I’d love to do more readings. My email is: joannpen@icloud.com.

LC: It’s been wonderful getting to know you through our mutual work with the Círculo de Poetas y Escritores, JoAnn. Mil gracias, JoAnn. Hasta pronto. 

Call me Niña
NO,
Pinta,
NO,
Santa Maria
Maybe just Maria... Don’t call me santa I’m not a saint.
 
When I die:
Anoint my lips with mango juice and a little bit of warm aguapanela, so that even in death
I’ll think of my mother.
Wrap me in hojas de platano como un tamal, and float me down the Magdalena.
Float with Magdalena.
Mary and Magdalene. Mary Magdalene.

I’ve lost track of what I look like.
My skin, hair, eyes, lips, nose.
Just rooms full of Marias
Let’s pretend I don’t exist,
Then you don’t have to call me anything at all.
 
When I was 18:
my boyfriend at the time told me he liked that we were in an interracial relationship.
That I was exotic. Unlike other girls.
Standing at the kitchen sink I took a second, then a breath.
The soap dish slithered from my hands, sending shards both seen and unseen.
All these years I thought we grew together, roots entangled but
mine had built bars around me, for safe keeping
while his had built a pedestal from which to better observe me.
 
Inside, in the place I can’t reach, but only feel.
I was the hand in front of my own face.
I had seen converging rivers, while he had seen–
well I don’t even know,
When we had sex I could only ever cum if I was on top.
That’ll show him.
Show him what?
 
I’ve lost track of what I look like.
 
At 21:
I slept with a woman, she was like me.
Don’t tell my mother. Don’t break her heart.
I let her lips close ‘round the roundness of my–
My lips on the wetness of her–
Ran my tongue down the valley-
I thought I saw–
***
God. Oh god.
Salt of my salt.
Afterwards we lay in bed together, thighs pressed against thighs and
I had to swallow hard at the lump in my throat when I realized
I couldn’t really love her because
I couldn’t love myself.
 
What do I look like?
 
Somewhere in the middle of the ocean of time and space there’s a transatlantic graveyard where drums reverberate in cool Atlantic waters.
Even after all this time,
We carry those rhythms in the beating of hearts, the beating of dancing steps.
These trees have been ripped out, roots raw and bloody seeking fertile grounds,
These roots seeking the warmth of a familiar sun,
The warmth of a familiar song.

I tried to grow on this rocky presbyterian mountain range, but no matter how much you water,
Guava trees will never give apples. ​

NICOLE NOEL HENARES

THE POET: A PERSONAL NARRATIVE

​I was born in the Monterey peninsula, California, in August, 1974. I proudly share the same birth date as the great labor activist and guerrillera cultural, Luisa Moreno, who organized the women of the Congress of Industrial Organizations, my grandmother’s labor union.
 
My grandparents and their families were members of the immigrant communities who worked on Cannery Row between the 1920’s and 1930’s in the Monterey Bay Area, California. After the collapse of the sardine canning eras in the 1950’s, my grandfather taught himself carpentry. Although it took him three times to pass the test, he became a general contractor. He was very proud of achieving his goal, as he did so without having any formal education.
 
All my cousins and I celebrated our birthdays at the Carousel in the old Edgewater Packing Company on Cannery Row. My fascination with Cannery Row and my family history began then.
 
I started school when I was five years old. I went to Marina Del Mar elementary school. Marina del Mar was a bedroom community of Fort Ord, the largest military base on the west Coast at that time. My mother was a teacher at the school I attended, and piloted one of the first multicultural education curriculums in the country under the tutelage of Dr. Charlie Knight, the first black superintendent of Monterey Peninsula Unified School District.
 
I read a poem when I was five years old. It was about strawberries and fairies. I felt inspired by the fairy book of poems I read then. But I didn’t write my first poem until I was seven. Every time I wrote poems I felt exalted. At the time, I wrote about many other subjects. But I loved writing about fairies. I was really into fairies.
 
I attended a predominantly white high school, in the city of Carmel, located near the city of Monterey. My high school English teacher was Ms. Gilbert--who is now Señora Quintanilla. It was in her classes, during my sophomore year, that we started discussing themes of race and gender. She had us reading everything from Chaim Potok to Lorraine Hansberry and Ray Bradbury. My favorite subjects were English, History and, French. I’m ashamed to admit that I took French and not Spanish to spite my father, because he used to tease me so much, telling me that I spoke Spanish like a gringa.
 
I was very shy around boys and didn’t feel safe around them until I was in high school. But I did have a lot of friends who helped me get through my freshman year. When I was in the ninth grade I was lucky to be mentored by a Latina student who was a senior. She advised me not to compare myself to the white girls. To be myself. She is now Dr. Lauren Padilla-Valverte, the head of the California Community Foundation.
 
The most memorable event in my life before age 18 was playing the Vivaldi violin concerto at the Spring Concert in 1989, my sophomore year, and getting straight A’s except for a B in math. I hated Math. I was 14.
 
Along with a B in Math, I got a D- in Health because pretended to sleep during Sex ED.  I was very uncomfortable in that class - I'm a survivor of early childhood sexual abuse.  In high school my friends and I were being groomed and molested by an older man we knew at the skating rink. Many of my girlfriends at that time were also victims of what we would call now intimate partner violence. It all bothered me. I didn't know how to talk about anything so I pretended to sleep.  The teacher threw erasers at me, but ended up telling my mom I was a "good kid" he just didn't understand what was wrong. Even in my poems from that time, I chose to focus on the resilience within love and connection for the world around me, rather than the pain. However, to fully understand our resilience the trauma it comes from needs to be acknowledged.

THE POETRY

They say the fourth plane that morning
             was heading here:
 
5pm
 
Lonely brass frog statues
            and armed barricades
surround the Trans-America Pyramid,
            glowing up Columbus Avenue
to lime and cherry chipped neon
            where strip club barkers idle:
Tonight, only the regular horny wander in,
            a hunchbacked
            Cornell educated former engineer,
            now poet, with rainbow suspenders,
            a skin condition, and Mork from Ork hair,
needing some semblance of normalcy
            in a stripper named Scout.
           
            Faithful restaurants
hesitantly remain open but empty;
            rows of tables,
            garlic,
            pannini,
            and chianti wait
            for customers
            who never come.
 
7pm
 
The streets are still,
            like Easter morning,
except, instead of church
            the people hide in the temple
of FOX, CNN, and ABC news, 
            praying the dead find resurrection
while polychromatic screens synthesize
            background music, instant replays
and red blocked letters           
 
AMERICA UNDER ATTACK.
 
In the bar with the photos
            of naked, now dead,
beat poets holding peace signs
            & flowers, a gaggle of workers
from the financial district
            dissolve around the television
that hovers morning into night.
            One stockbroker, his hair a perfect wave,
who says his friends worked in the Towers,
            loudly slurs through curled lips,
“I hope we bomb them, bomb them all,
            even the young, before they’re old enough to kill..”  
The bartender shaky with white knuckles,
            wants to reply
but the day has been slow
            and she needs the tip.
 
9:30 pm
In another bar, one of the only 
            in North Beach without a television,
an overly hormonal tranny torch singer,
            an English teacher,
and a piano player named Sam-I-Am
            share a basket of Danish cheese and crackers,
while arguing over the spelling of
            Afghanistan and the logic that Grendel
killed the Danes just because he was “evil”.
            They wait for  James, 
            who’s full of  Wizard of Oz
            masonic conspiracy theories,
complaints about backwards baseball caps
            and the price of hot-dogs,
to  hear what he’s gonna say.
 
11pm
Wearing wrinkled pinstripes,
            two young blues musicians
play guitar in an alley
            with Lightnin’ Hopkins’ vengeance- 
They never say a word
            about the tempo, terrorists,
or vapid late summer night.
            If John Lee Hooker’s
holy Crawlin’ Kingsnake,
            or a big legged woman
slithered next to them
            they’d only butter
from 12  to 7 bar blues.
            One of them has suffered heroin,
baby mama drama, and recently five days
            in the drunk tank.
The other, on vacation from Finland,
            has lost his wallet, passport,
            and two guitars
            in three months.  
Every blues is their blues;
            through the night in doorways
with purple and green mardi gras beads,
            lousy tarps and bottles of Hennessey
to keep them warm.

2004



Thou Mayest
 
THIS IS THE BREAD OF THE CHOSEN
THIS IS THE FOOD OF THE ACCURSED
 
we are a culture of beernuts/
fox sports/ major league/ too much/
shopping/ when the going gets rough/
 towers are bombed/
the tough are encouraged/ to consume/
Keep America Open For Business/
one night stands and three marriages
moralistic lies /a smoke and mirrors of values
and greed/ spooning chainsaws jetskies NASCAR
gasoline/ racing /
buy one pie get the second for free
 
we are a nation of flatulence
go team go
faster bigger MORE
where the package is more interesting than the toy
 
it’s a cataclysm of the heart
a wanton sickness
cheap words and extravagant catcalls
placing me head first
into the bellies of vases/legs flying out/
heart shaped orchid exposed/ only for/
a copulating squawk
 
as the coin twists in the air
the shock of the bourgeoisie/
the self proclaimed café hip/ just another
commodity for sale/ thinking poetry
is bread of the enlightened/ the chosen
so smug in hip righteousness/words
pockmarked in cheap jewels & artificial fruity
blossoms
 
this is the food of the accursed/ the morsels of the
damned/
the kernels of those/ who are nothing/
but a statistic to throw around in coffee shops/
a girl who has seen more death at sixteen/ than
anyone should/
she told me she couldn’t even recognize his face
because it was so covered in blood
when he was shot after school on the 29 MUNI
and she lives here/ in this city/ in our backyard
 
the slaughter  continues
/another kid in a coffin we’re not allowed to see/
another imprisoned /headlines just hyper-reality
television/
while others like them fight and torture in foreign
lands
 
and in our glittering high-rises
the twins dance tangerine waltzes /acerbic hipsters
syncopate f# on the half note/sip pinot grigio spritzers/
sway with venetian glass eggs up their stoned asses/
point that’s so bourgeois / in between
troubled time signatures/ and watery coughs from
next-door
 
yet it is the same melancholic tune at 2 am/ babies in
cradles of filth/
momma just a baby raised by the television/
 
so
come and see
come and see
 
DO YOU SEE
 
I am a deformation for the cursed
 
I snore variations composed on laughter   
with my cape on and kitchen utensil corsage
dirging sonorous nonsense / as a meal
 
my mouth is filled with muddied jellied flowers
juggling soured waters
pustulled clocks gnawing on the husks of time
 
between my black sounds
/the death among the bougainvillea/
live giant balloons/ and hummingbird springs
pale stalks of corn /blackberries/ without brambles/
snapped open fuchsia blossoms
/releasing nectar for the bleeding
 
while the arrogant wear their spoils
I swallow poetry
                as a prayer

2004



The Dance Of The Urban Honeybee
 for Ric Masten
 I needed to mail a letter
 so I go to my corner Walgreen’s
 and purchase 4 stamps for $1.99...
 Later, when the 48 cent difference occurs to me,
 I wonder if I paid extra
 for the red cursive emblemed cardboard
 and plastic wrapping,
or convenience?
 
 Yesterday I saw a man yell
 at hotel strikers-
 workers of less than $10/hour, locked out
 for demanding health benefits.
The man said the strikers made too much noise"
"Shut the fuck up!"
"Shut the fuck up!"
 
 They call me teacher, poet, guide;
 the honeybee sent out to find a new destination
 where the hive can find safety.
 
 Yet, I'm finding no answers;
my students think I'm crazy,
 too tough of a grader,
 there's a hole in the ceiling of my classroom,
and the heater doesn't work.
 
On the streets, panhandlers stand on their heads
 next to marquis that say, "All you could ever want to eat".
 While, Bitsey, the heroin addict midget prostitute
 crutches across Market Street
 her freshly amputated left stump
 swinging in rhythm
 with the swoosh of traffic.
 And what's most sad is that it is all so familiar.
 
So I dance my hallucinatory jig that's supposed to tell,
"this is where we go from here"
 to a vacant hive of
 no answers just
 a solitary moan of panicked despair.

2004



The Downcast Dreamer
 
Tonight in this limpid ball it's just me
and the alleyway mourning doves
saying to hell with it all.
 
I surround myself in miniature
ornamental beauty
because it’s easier to live
in the watery glitter of a snow-globe
than search for the ineffable
in the perfume of the city’s
rust and dream
white laced with sorrow
and the ash of rage.
 
I'm turning mermaid and a bit sea-witch,
my heart with the sexless ocean,
shiny hard and gaudy,
while the doves get drunk like pigeons
and hoot tintinnabulations of angels
and soundless blessings
to empty arms.

2005


 
Comfort Of The Dead
I dreamt of the dead last night, for the second time this week.
It was a most rare vision, perhaps past the wit of man to say what dream it was.
We were at a play that was being performed
            in a big auditorium with red, white and blue seats.
He had arrived early.
He wasn’t high, he didn’t even have a beer with him.
He had arrived early, and was waiting for me. He even saved me a seat.
The show was sold out. It was a performance of Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice - 
(Once upon a time, he ground scored an entire pocket book collection of Shakespeare for me                        because he knew that I loved Shakespeare.)
I was running late, in self pity and despair.
Then the realization set in-
Yes, our country had elected a president,
but he was still alive.
He never had died.
He was alive and he was waiting for me in an auditorium
where we were going to watch a performance of A Merchant of Venice.
Some of my students were in the lobby handing out programs.
I panicked to find my seat. He wasn’t angry, he held my hand
and whispered in my ear that of course he would hold a seat for me, 
he would always hold a seat for me.
He said all that he said when he was alive-
That his white last name did not matter,
he would always be proud of his brown skin.
It did not matter what the historians could or could not dig up,
his family had been here since before there were borders,
before this was even a state, and was just a place with a made up name.
“First we were generals and governors, then we were bad hombres:
All that glitters isn’t gold, the quality of our mercy is very fucking strained,
                        and why shouldn’t it be?”
The only thing that had changed,
was that he no longer said anything about his punk rock nihilism,
or wanting to watch the world burn.
The only thing he said he wanted to do was watch that play.
And as the curtain rose, he whispered,
“The poem’s the thing to love for eternity.” 
 
 2016
 


Then And Now
 
“If the problem with PTSD is disassociation the goal of treatment would be association- integrating the cut off elements of the trauma into the ongoing narrative of life, so that the brain can recognize that ‘that was then, and this is now.’” BESSEL VAN DER KOLK
 
Now that I have remembered I can never forget
            the tick of your heart against my cheek         
in cold and time travel and fog.
 
your caution knew me and hung in my mouth.
You were in trouble, needed to leave,
            but wanted to say,
            I didn’t need to marry a poet to be a poet
confessions stitched my griefs into silence.
            I knew you too.
 
You were water and mirror
            my body remembers in rhythms
and strange dreams haunt me.
            Dreams of the dead and regret
                                    when I am sitting in a vat of truth
addicted to the taste of illusion and shadow,
my greedy skin like dragon scales
all sense of myself
 made no sense.
             So I scratched and scratched
until my fingernails dug beyond flesh, beyond longing,
until there was nothing left but blood and bone,
and the stubbed beginnings
            of great green feathers.
 
Happiness is more than earthly delights.
(There is only so much sadness allowed.)
            The poems synthesize,
enter a temple of prayer.
My words tell me things:
Conjoin clever rhymes
            find coyness within symbols 
 that never dissolve like eighth notes carved into mountains.
Chimeras are imperishable and can mother beauty.
Forget the intoxication of anger and fear and rot
Now is winter in my kitchen.
Now is earth and my ear pressed to chest after washed dishes,
 thank you falls from lips. 
            Now is spring and cusp,
bending down onto knees and teasing 
            my cat with a bright pink feather attached to a stick.
Now is entwined fingers
                        speeding along the blur of blacks and golds
on a nighttime bridge of lights
            amid pandemic and awakening.
  
 
​
EL POEMA es la erección del ahorcado. Demasiado tarde y para nadie. Pero ahí.

-David Eloy Rodriguez

 I Will Wear Yellow

Te quiero,
entiendes?
 
I will wear yellow.
 
Estas palabras son las palabras
de mi sangre,
y mi alma,
entiendes?  
 
No entiendo como
tú eres como eres.
 
No entiendo nada,
ni el por qué devoras mi corazón,
mi cuerpo, mi cabeza, y mis ojos.
 
No entiendo nada,
sólo que te quiero.
 
No entiendo nada más. Te quiero.
 
I will wear yellow because
I am always trying to find light.
Every night the sunset echoes from behind the trees.
 
I remain a heart
in the green of mourning.
But I will wear yellow.
 
Tonight I am with the waning moon
who hovers
over the world
with her ever changing face.
I have listened closely to the secrets
the past has told.
Don’t worry so much about the future-
only the differences
between intention and expectation.
The oranges are beginning
to appear again,
and in May the jacaranda
will bloom electric and purple.
There is always the possibility of starvation
and catastrophe and ego and war,
but, even then,
there is the humble magic
of licorice
and I know how to find it.
 
Sometimes I hear pointing,
accusatory silences, and the sunset continues
to cry louder and louder with the click of time.
I will wear brass hoops around my ears and around my wrists.
I will fall into water.
I will wear yellow.
All lovebirds are mourning doves.
They know my sorrow, like you know my sorrow,
and have poured salt and pepper into these wounds,
 
reminding me to look for light
as my words turn into the echoes
of ragged claws scuttling
across the ocean floor,
and I dress my heart in yellow.
 
 2020

******

LC: Nicole, did you live in San Francisco’s North Beach at the time you wrote these poems? When? Why?
 
NNH: From 2001-2013 I lived in Lower Nob Hill about a fifteen minute walk from near North Beach. I gravitated to that neighborhood because of its history with the Beats.
 
LC: How were those years different from your life in Monterey and your painful experiences in Carmel as you were growing up?
 
NNH: In 2001, after 9-11, everything was surreal in the ways it wasn’t surreal. In August 2001 one of my closest friends had OD’d on heroin and had to be identified by his dental records. Two months after 9-11, my godbrother was killed in a drug related murder.  There was something  familiar about all the chaos. It was easier to make sense out of the political chaos than my personal chaos, but I realize how much both were interconnected. In 2001 I started keeping a notebook again because I had moved to San Francisco to teach and to write. But I had always been writing intermittently throughout my life and expressed political views. I started keeping a diary in 1981 when I was five years old. My first diary entry was, “The hostages were released today, poor Jimmy Carter.”

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.​​

“Go defend our country son make Uncle Sam proud.
Don’t worry about a High School Diploma,
You’ve got the Viet Cong to think about.
 
You’ll be physically fit, cock strong, in your dress blues
All these westside chicks are gonna want to fuck you
 
You’ll have medals pinned on your chest, a career as a cook or custodian
Benefits with a steady paycheck, a cheap little house with an iron fence
 
C’mon be a real man with a rifle in your hands
And tell them all, later on, about the young heroes of war
Jungle sounds, Khe San and how things were in’ Nam.

 Vietnamese rats
Chasing like rabid dogs
So large you couldn’t swallow
Shooting women
And children
Coming back
To be a Little League coach
For your kids-
A hero?
A patriot?
 
Wearing a red and gold cover
That reads:
             1967-1969 Reconnaissance USMC
Raising a Devil Dog flag in the front yard
Next to an American flag.
                                                          Everyone driving by knows where you stand.
                                                     Who you are
                                         A Veterano
                                        What you did
                           For this country
                  That is not yours
              A dream you’re not in.

is physically fit,
says OORAH when they see another marine,
has American pride,
honors the eagle, globe and anchor,
has a bulldog named Chesty,
tells war stories,
while polishing his medals,
banks with USAA,
psycho tough,
ready to kill,
never hesitates,
knows martial arts like Chuck Norris,
is an alcoholic with a side chick,
has PTSD,
a racist in denial,
attends air shows with the silent drill platoon.
 
A real marine says
this country has gone to shit,
doesn’t want to die,
because their grandson is gay,
on the flip,
he wants gays in the military to serve as bullet-catchers.
 
A real marine gets shafted by the corps,
years later,
thankless service,
wearing a red cover,
USMC t-shirt,
won’t stop until the job is done,
flashbacks,
hates Asians,
haircut high n’ tight,
originally from Parris Island,
is sometimes a tio taco,
not that amphibious,
a cock boy in dress uniform,
marching at grocery stores.
 
A real marine trains people of color to kill people of color.
A United States fucking Marine,
trained to kill anyone,
anything,
even himself.
 
I didn’t go to war.

Vielka Solano reads from her book Naked Offering

Vielka Solano lee de su libro, Desnuda Ofrenda

Desnuda
 
Me gusta andar desnuda por el mundo
salvo quizás por las palabras
sin dolor cubriéndome la piel
mis tentadores volcanes en el medio al frente
orgullosos
mis tripas rugientes ahogadas en merlot
 
Sin Calvin Klein Victoria Jacob Versase o Lauren
Sin tejidos caprichosos cubriendo mi vientre
mis piernas
mis hebras rebeldes
 
Sin las palmeras de artificios carcomidos
en mentes infectadas de malicia
cubriendo mis nalgas o mi sexo
 
Desnuda
recorrer el patio del ensueño
dejando que las gardenias me abracen
mientras Óscar se sonríe pícaro
y deja que el viento descarado
le mueva las ramas
 
Sentarme en el medio del verde manjar
y tocarme los muslos
con la yerba silvestre que provoca mis ganas
y me lleva al diluvio
desnuda
me encanta
 
Desnuda
 
Saborear los suspiros de olores
revueltos en la cocina
la alegría que me alcanza resbalando
por mi lengua insaciable
 
Des     nu       da
 
Masturbar el deseo entre el calor de julio
o el frío de enero
Dejar que se cuelguen las cicatrices
de mi cuerpo liberado
sin importar la mirada mal puesta
el pensamiento podrido o el deseo infectado
la malla de artimañas
los discursos sin sentido
 
Y qué coño
                        me gusta
andar desnuda por el mundo
sin la necesidad del vestido
para guiar mis pasos
o la aceptada sonrisa aprobándome
y que digan que soy putatrevidaloca
que está de venta la carne
me encanta   andar  desnuda
 
Y qué coño
 
y qué

 
Anónimo
 
(En silencio
no vaya a ser que me deporten)
 
Partir la historia en segmentos
abrazar este de ahora
propagando una idea sin divisiones
Volcar este arrebato de letras promisorias en el sartén
y cocinarlo  
Llenarlo con el calor congelado
de los putos hombres
brutos            
perdón
esos que se creen que tiran el caño más largo
flagelos encontrados entre rayos divididos
 
Volcar el hechizo de la reina condecorada
sin rostro
que a pataleos hizo presencia
entre pezones duros tatuados de gozo
entre conglomerado de injusticia patriarcal
arrasando las faldas pensantes
y el intelecto preñado de blasfemia
 
Recordar el comienzo
 
Abrazar esta tarde poblada de cuerpos llenos de sueños  
cargados de mierda perfumada
perdón
cagados
y un dolor colectivo que derrama los baldes
hechos de quejas                                       
que levanta las rabias y las metrallas
y las estrellas
y el odio somático que abraza las calles
la tuya
la mía
la de ellos
rompiendo
un continente
dos continentes
todos los continentes
 
En dos patas
psicópatas descerebrados
deambulan los callejones
 
También deambulan en mi casa
shhhhhhhh en la casa blanca
corazones sin alas sin ventrículo sin futuro
una cultura de razas etiquetadas por pieles amarillasblancasnegras
entre discursos de porcelana
semblantes anémicos
supremacía barata
 
Puertas cerradas
fronteras
regateando el poderío del norte
como mierda de putrefactos seres
desamparados de sentimiento
 
Quiero agarrar este trozo
arrancárselo a esos pendejos
pobres seres
des  alma  dos
infames
macabros
perdón
ma tar los
Perdón
            perdón
mal va dos
a ca bar los

​
Ofrenda
 
¡Corre!
¡Corre!
¡Corre!
 
Cuélgate del sol o de la luna llena
Ponte la gardenia blanca entre los muslos y
¡Corre!
¡Corre!
¡Corre!
 
Deja los rizos libres al viento
cubiertos de ensangrentadas
estrellas
 
Mutiladas por mentes malditas
masturbándose con el manjar
que las ha manejado por milenios
 
Como tú
ellas
nacieron detrás de un crucifijo
de un pez con doble ojo
y como tú
abrazaron sueños que ni siquiera
de manos de la lechuza
les fue posible alcanzar
 
Montaron hormigas picantes
como ají habanero
sin plan
sin premeditación
solo alevosía
sin ventaja
 
Batallaron entre el culo del profesor
macabro y la lombriz amarilla
preñada de quejidos pendejos
 
Como tú
se tropezaron con un terrón de azúcar
y mermelada de fresa
que las llevó al infierno
y así
como tú
corretearon un sueño varado
entre platos sin platanos
y sin arroz
y sin ni siquiera una muñeca de trapo
 
¡Corre!
¡Corre!
¡Corre!
 
Deja que el sol de junio cambie
las cicatrices de tu clítoris por astros
Abraza la luna llena
 
Otras muchas como tú
aporrearon los perros bravos
tratando de resguardar el centro
Ese que no alcanzó a tocar el traficante
ni el mercado de brujas
sin escobas mágicas
Ellas
también jugaban a Mambrú se fue a la guerra
qué dolor
qué dolor
qué pena
mientras les bajaban los pantis en un callejón
entre charcos de lluvia rojablancanegra
Y así salían del escondite
montadas en caballitos de un mar rojo
envueltas en sábanas de abandono
 
¡Ay muchachita!
¡Ay niña mía!
Entierra las monedas de ese rancio coyote
que se cruza las verjas
usadas como símbolo pútrido
que recorre los bancos y se revuelve
en los cementerios
Pisotéalas
Párteles el olfato
a esos tigres diente de sable
tigres de Tasmania
leones de las cavernas
bestias lanudas
megaterios
exterminadores de tu universo
que llegan como fuerza constrictora
arrasando tu inocencia  
 
Cabalga tu historia
arrástralos hacia el centro del Monte Merapi
entiérralos en el Nyiragongo
que su lava de más de doscientos mil grados
les desintegre la conciencia pedregosa
 
¡Vamos!
            ¡Vamos!
                        ¡Vamos!
 
Cuelga tus bucles de cuarzo
de citrina de amatista o de hojalata
Levántalos sobre el atardecer
y entrégalos en bandejas
colmadas de flores frescas
 
Cuelga también tu vientre rosa
sobre el pantano de astros negros
que tocan tus pies
junto al de ellas
ofrécelo a los dioses
 
Levanta tu sueño
¡Vuela!
            ¡Vuela!
¡Vuela!
 
Yo ya estoy aquí

Follow along as Rebecca Granado performs "Tres Millas a mi Libertad"

​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.

​                                     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--

​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.