“Por escrito”

Lucha Corpi (LC) entrevista a Graciela Brauer Ramírez (GBR), Catedrática jubilada de la Universidad Estatal de California en Sacramento. Poeta y narradora chicana, y trabajadora cultural incansable. Miembro de “Escritores del Nuevo Sol” en el Valle de Sacramento y de “Círculo de poetas & Writers” en la Bahía de San Francisco, con sede en Oakland. 

AZTLÁN – El lugar de las garzas

LC: Querida Graciela, cómo se ve claramente, en la portada de tu libro están estampadas las garzas, aves que normalmente habitan a orillas de los ríos en California y en México: Algunos de los ríos más caudalosos se encuentran en el sur de México y precisamente en el estado de Veracruz, del que eres originaria.

Me fascinó ver que tu obra comienza con una descripción del Río Americano (the American River) que atraviesa de lado a lado la Cd. de Sacramento, capital del estado de California.
​
Según la leyenda indígena mexicana, AZTLÁN era el lugar de origen de las varias tribus pre-colombinas, las que poblaban el continente de América, desde Alaska y Canadá hasta Tierra del Fuego en Sudamérica. 

A primera vista se podría también decir que EDUCACIÓN: Una Épica Chicana de la catedrática, poeta y narradora, Graciela Brauer Ramírez, es un libro de texto histórico. Ofrece una visión y cronología histórico-política de acontecimientos que se suscitaron en la Cd. de Sacramento, capital del estado de California, durante las décadas de 1960 a 1980.

Al mismo tiempo, ofrece una vista panorámica del movimiento socio-político y pro-derechos civiles del pueblo México-americano en EE.UU., es decir de la población que se autodefine políticamente como chicanos. De una manera más general, bosqueja también el impacto de los logros de esta población, desde entonces hasta la fecha. 

Desde el punto de vista literario sigue las reglas de una epopeya clásica, es decir como lo fueran la Odisea o Ilíada en la antigüedad. Es un relato en verso y trata de las hazañas de héroes en tiempos de guerra y en defensa de su pueblo, su historia y cultura.
​
Más aún, es la infra-historia de una familia californiana, con fuertes lazos culturales, literarios e históricos, con México y el sudoeste de Estados Unidos. Gracias. Graciela.  Lucha Corpi

Entrevista y plática: Lucha Corpi (LC) y Graciela Brauer Ramírez (GBR) en conversación.
 
Influencias: En familia o comunitarias: 

LC: Tu obra culturalmente es parte de una tradición oral, pero lo es también de la literaria. Es en verdad, Una Épica Chicana, y una obra monumental. ¡Enhorabuena, Graciela!

Ahora, cuéntanos un poco sobre tu niñez y adolescencia en familia. Sabemos que tu padre fue de gran influencia en ti, quien estimuló tu sed intelectual por el conocimiento y la lectura. Aprendiste a leer a los cuatro años. Entiendo que tu convivencia con otros parientes, en ambos lados, también fue muy importante.

En familia, aparte de tu papá y mamá, ¿Quiénes más fueron de gran influencia en ti durante tu niñez?

GBR: Como digo en mi libro, Una épica chicana, por las noches, en familia, nos juntábamos en el patio y cada uno decía poesías o contaba historias. Por ejemplo, a mi tío Homero le gustaban las historias del mar y de barcos. Después fue marinero. Mi tío Sergio siempre nos contaba la misma historia sólo le cambiaba los nombres de los personajes.

A mí me subían en una silla y recitaba: “Mamá, soy Paquito, no haré travesuras…” Y también una que dice: “Guadalupe la Chinaca va en busca de Pantaleón su marido…” Dado que a los cuatro años yo no podía todavía hablar bien, recitaba este verso a mi manera: “aupe anaca busca a neon maido…”

Mi tía Elena, aun cuando ya estaba yo grande, se burlaba de mí imitándome, pues a esa edad temprana no podía yo hablar claro, pero, según yo, ya recitaba. También mi tía me decía que cuando terminaba yo les pedía aplausos al “púbico” (el público).

LC: Me haces reír. Muy divertido. Ya entrando a la secundaria, ¿seguiste recitando poemas en público?

GBR: Claro que sí. Ya de estudiante, en la secundaria, recitaba en concursos y en uno de ellos gané el primer premio al recitar de memoria el poema “Los Motivos del Lobo” de Rubén Darío el gran poeta de Nicaragua. Hasta la fecha, ya en mi vejez, aún recuerdo todo este poema tan largo.

LC: Entonces, en cuanto a los lugares que fueron importantes en tu desarrollo durante tus años tempranos, sabemos que viviste en la Cd. de México y que sufriste los calores y el bochorno del trópico en el puerto de Veracruz.
                                                
En el prólogo de Educación: Una Épica Chicana, JoAnn Anglin, gran poeta y narradora, a quien también tengo el gusto y la honra de conocer, nos da algunos datos personales tuyos, pero bastante esquemáticos.

LC: Si te es posible, cuéntanos un poco de ti, de tu vida personal antes de unirte al cuerpo docente de la Universidad Estatal de California (California State University at Sacramento-CSUS).

GBR: Las gentes que tuvieron más influencia en mi infancia fueron mi papá y mi tía abuela Juanita. El me introdujo a la lectura, al grado de que cuando fui al kínder ya había leído varios libros de cuentos que él siempre me compraba.

Mi tía abuela Juanita tenía una tienda de abarrotes a media cuadra de nuestro apartamento. Ella tenía su recámara arriba de la tienda. A veces ella me cuidaba o cuando iba a la tienda inmediatamente subía a su recámara pues ahí tenía muchos libros. Ahí leí: Corazón Diario de un Niño, Las Mil y Una Noches y muchas otras obras que aún viven en mi mente y que me han ayudado a sobrevivir. Un día mi tía me sorprendió mucho cuando me regaló estos dos libros y algunos más.

También mi papá. Él era militar, y por algunas horas, también valuador en la mayor casa de empeño controlada por el gobierno. A veces tenían subastas y la mercancía que quedaba la repartían entre los trabajadores. Esta era generalmente de libros, los cuales él traía al apartamento. Entre esos libros leí, con ayuda de adultos, La Vuelta al Mundo en Ochenta Días, El Jorobado de Nuestra Señora de París y muchos más. Fui muy afortunada.
                                                  
LC: Nos has contado que debido al trabajo de tu papá, quién era militar, viviste en diferentes lugares. ¿Cómo afectó el pasar tu infancia y adolescencia en comunidades tan diferentes una de la otra?

GBR: Primero, era una bebé y mientras que las mismas personas me cuidaran, no había problema. Después, cuando contaba con cuatro años, mi papá me ponía en el tren los viernes por la noche y mi abuelito me recogía en el puerto de Veracruz en la mañana del sábado. El regreso era viaje opuesto, por supuesto, de domingo en la noche a lunes por la mañana. También pasaba todas las vacaciones en la costa del Golfo de México, que era la costa veracruzana.

Vivir en el puerto de Veracruz fue para mí una experiencia muy afortunada pues mi abuelito era una persona muy educada al haber estudiado en el seminario; había leído mucho. Con él aprendí bastante.

También en Veracruz vivían mis tíos quienes eran muy adeptos a las poesías. Mi tío Carlos, por ejemplo, sabía muchas de ellas de memoria. En las noches nos recitaba versos de sus autores favoritos como Díaz Mirón, poeta veracruzano. Mi tía Estela recitaba en las escuelas. Aún recuerdo una de sus poesías favoritas que dice: “…espera la caída de las hojas.”

Mi abuelito y su hijo mayor trabajaban en el ferrocarril me conocían y me querían bastante. A menudo, ellos me llevaban de viaje. Durante mis viajes la tripulación del ferrocarril me cuidaba.
 
LC: Cuéntanos también de tu familia materna y de tu educación formal y adolescencia

GBR: Cursé la primaria en El Colegio de San Ignacio de Loyola comúnmente conocido como Colegio de las Vizcaínas, una escuela católica en la Ciudad de México. Mis padres se divorciaron cuando yo tenía menos de un año. Mi papá tomó la responsabilidad de criarme. Él era militar así es que yo crecí regimentada, cosa que siempre le he agradecido pues aprendí disciplina, algo que me ha servido toda mi vida, y que él hizo con mucho amor.

A los 15 años me fui a vivir con mi mamá. Ella era una famosa cantante de música ranchera. Mi vida con ella era excitante pues me llevaba a los teatros y estaciones de radio en donde conocí artistas famosos de aquella época. Por otro lado, ella era una persona muy extrovertida y se impacientaba mucho conmigo por ser yo sumamente introvertida.

Con ella viajé en sus giras por muchos estados de México y lugares en los Estados Unidos como las ciudades fronterizas de El Paso, Texas y San Diego, California, además de Los Ángeles en California, entre otras.

Desgraciadamente mi mamá y yo éramos demasiado diferentes. Ella era una feminista que a los 40 años se hizo torera aficionada; yo vivía dentro de los libros. Con mis padres crecí en dos mundos completamente opuestos. Sin embargo, en ambos mundos, todas mis experiencias fueron muy buenas.
 
LC: En esta entrevista quiero hacer resaltar no sólo tu trayectoria poética-literaria sino también tu participación en el movimiento pro-derechos civiles y humanos del pueblo chicano en Estados Unidos. Al leer tu obra, me doy cuenta que tú fuiste testigo y participante en muchos de los acontecimientos que describes en tu libro durante “el movimiento chicano”. Cuéntanos sobre esta importante época de tu vida.

GBR: Mi participación en los primeros años de pertenecer al movimiento chicano, fue la siguiente: ayudaba en lo que podía como organizar eventos poéticos, así como los Simposios de Pensadores del Tercer Mundo y otros más.

También ayudaba en sus funciones para recaudar fondos como ventas de pan dulce, tacos etc. Me daba de voluntaria para ayudar a organizaciones como CAMP (College Assistance Migrant Program) entre otras. También tuve en el barrio, en el Washington Neighborhood Center, un programa tutorial en el que llevaba estudiantes de la universidad a enseñar a los niños.

Lo óptimo de mi participación fue cuando formulé y comencé a enseñar el curso “La Mujer Chicana” en el Departamento de Estudios Étnicos, de la Universidad Estatal de California en su campus de Sacramento-CSUS. El gran poeta y activista chicano, José Montoya, era catedrático en este mismo departamento.

Después de haber recibido algunos reconocimientos por mi participación en el movimiento chicano, mi mayor orgullo llegó un día cuando José Montoya me llamó y me dijo: “Gracias, Graciela, porque nunca nos has dejado”. Este ha sido el mejor reconocimiento que he recibido en mi vida.

José tenía razón. He creído siempre que es un derecho de todo ser humano tener acceso a la educación formal. Me uní al Movimiento Chicano Pro-derechos humanos y civiles. Para los chicanos, acceso a una buena educación era lo que más deseaban. Sentí como si un imán me atraía hacia ellos.

También a José Montoya siempre le viviré agradecida. El organizaba programas y recitales de poesía en la universidad. Fue él quien me apoyó é invitó a leer mi obra poética en público, por primera vez en mi vida. Cómo recuerdo cuanto sufrí, y las ansias que me causó, pues tenía demasiado miedo de leer en público. Yo había leído en programas escolares pero nunca en programas en público en general. José lo notó y con sus palabras me animó mucho. Al fin, temblaba pero lo hice.  La publiqué.​

La Poesía de Graciela B. Ramírez

REBOZO

Rebozo que humillado
te escondías,
mas con la revolución
volviste altivo
en los hombros de Frida**
quien sin miedo
te sacó de penumbras
ensalzando
los colores brillantes de tus hilos.
Así volviste
a colorear las fiestas
adornando con gracia a las mujeres
quienes ahora en cuerpos
te lucían
o zapateando en moños
te enredaban.

Rebozo que en los campos de batalla
de la intemperie
protegías a guerrilleras
y en las noches
cubriendo a los amantes
creabas mundo privado
en que chasquidos
de besos
resonaban en el aire
y después el amor
bajo de ti hacían
porque quizá la luz del sol
​Ya no verían
Rebozo, con tus hebras
acaricias
de las futuras madres
sus vientres esponjados,
entibiando matrices,
dando calor a fetos,
enlazando dos seres
en comunión sagrada

Cordón umbilical
de madre y niño
porque cuando ellas cargan,
cual marsupias,
a sus tiernos infantes,
ellos saben
que no hay peligro alguno
porque tú con firmeza
los sostienes.

Y también con amor
cubres los senos
cuando el pequeño
cual gatito tierno
mama la tibia leche
de su madre
y arrullado
con ritmos de latidos
sueña
envuelto
en respiros melodiosos
y despierta al sentir
hondo suspiro
y se ve reflejado
en dulces ojos.
                                                                       
**Nota Bene: Frida Kahlo volvió a hacer famoso el rebozo de seda mexicano. A este rebozo también se le conoce como Rebozo de seda de Santa María, el pequeño pueblo en el estado de San Luis Potosí, en donde se encuentran los telares de rebozos. Ahí mismo también se pueden ver los sembradíos de las plantas de las que se alimentan las orugas que el público en general conoce como “los gusanos de seda”.

Frida también mostró el modo, arte y orgullo de portarlo el rebozo. Fue precisamente durante las décadas de los años sesenta y setenta que las mujeres chicanas, México-americanas y latinas volvieron una vez más a hacer legítimo el uso del rebozo, tanto el de algodón como el de seda. -LC

Tlaloc
​
There came a day when
your gigantic statue       
was moved
from its birth place
to Chapultepec’s
sacred emerald forest
where hundreds
of crickets sing for you
the eternal
welcoming song
 
Slowly, so slowly
168 tons of stone
moved through
Tenochtitlan’s streets
cradled in the
specially-built trailer
going slowly,
So slowly.
 
During the night,
work crews
disconnected and
reconnected electrical
wires needed because
of your 23-foot height.
Perhaps you laughed
At all the attention
From the multitudes
 
After the 30-mile journey,
came the huge explosion,
like a Big Bang,
embedding our memories
back in our city recalling
years of invasions,
centuries of deep pain.
 
But finally, the gift
of spiritual Renaissance
as you passed
through the Zócalo,
The Great Temple,
El Templo Mayor.
At that precise instant
came the deluge,
your fertility water,
your life-giving water,
your survival water,
your baptismal water,
your melting jade rain
that poured over us
running in force
through our city
washing us in blessings
and forgiving waters
through archeological sites,
the burial homes
of your ancestors
the burial homes of
our ancestors.
Tláloc, the Great Tláloc:
The eagle and the serpent
Acknowledged you
As the Lord of the Third Sun,
As God of all Water.
 
PINCELADAS

Instantly becoming one
With the new born moon
And the eastern star
 
All of a sudden
Autumn smiles
Reddish leaves
 
Cosumnes River
Witness in silence
Courtship of cranes
 
The broom
Escapes from my hands
Dishes
Look at me with anger
Magic of Jazz
Is for me
Sensuality and
Spirituality
Interwoven
Only the pencil
Calls me by my name
Rain, flamenco woman
Dancer
Stamping
On the roof of my house.

**CHICANOS Y LA LENGUA
 
Esta es la historia de la gente…
que nace o emigra en retroceso,
a esas tierras que ancestros disfrutaron,
a lugares viniendo de regreso,
que ejércitos extraños conquistaron,
sitio donde las grullas con su beso
y su baile, colonias iniciaron.
Esta es la gente que con ansia busca,
un lugar en el sol, cosa muy justa. ...
 
**EPIFANÍA CHICANA

 Aztlán renace, del chicano cuna
su núcleo de las cuatro direcciones
aurículas en Utah y Colorado
ventrícula del sur en Arizona
y otra en Nuevo México hechicero,
Aztlán cuyas arterias cristalinas
de estrellas salpicadas son Ríos Grande,
Colorado y también el Sacramento. ...
 
**LC: Estrofas de Educación: Una Epica Chicana, p. 3 y 24

GBR: Aquí estamos José Montoya y yo esperando una de las cuatro ceremonias pre-Colombinas en Sacramento (la de los niños, la de las jóvenes o Xilonen, la de los jóvenes y el Día de los Muertos). En los setenta José fue uno de los iniciadores de ellas y tuvo a su cargo el altar del norte o el de los viejitos. Yo empecé en el sagrado círculo como a principio de los ochenta y duré en la dirección del norte con José como 25 años o más que fueron inolvidables pues pasar más de 9 horas en compañía de José preparando el altar, marcar el círculo con polvo de maíz, mantener el fuego en el salmador, esperar al grupo que iba a recibir consejos y dárselos fue una de mis mejores experiencias. Con él y los Chicanos aprendí muchísimo. 

Generalmente leo con mi grupo “Escritores del Nuevo Sol”. Yo soy la que organizo los recitales poéticos en Sacramento. Nuestros programas son en lugares como “Sol Collective”, “Luna’s Café”, y “The Poetry Center”. Hace tiempo iba con mi grupo de escritores a leer en las ciudades de San Francisco, Stockton, Yuba City y otros lugares en California. También en ocasiones leo como parte del grupo al que también pertenezco “Círculo de Poetas & Writers” con base en Oakland, California y miembros en varias ciudades del norte de California.  

LC: ¿Cómo y dónde pueden los interesados conseguir el libro Educación: Una Épica Chicana?

1) De la autora: email:  24bucareli@gmail.com 

2) I Street Press, A Community Writing and Publishing Center, Sacramento Public Library

3) Sacramento Poetry Center
 
LC: No hay duda, apreciada Graciela, que has tenido una larga y fascinante carrera como catedrática y poeta. Me encanta tu actitud ante la vida: siempre optimista. Eres de gran inspiración a todos nosotros, tanto a los “Escritores del Nuevo Sol” como los miembros del “Círculo de poetas & Writers”. 

Mil gracias por tu participación en esta serie de entrevistas, patrocinadas por el periódico bilingüe Somos en escrito y por “Círculo de poetas & Writers” en la bahía de San Francisco.                                                                                      

**En especial, mis más sinceras gracias a Jenny Irizary of Somos en escrito, por su paciencia y asistencia técnica en esta serie de entrevistas mes tras mes. Abrazos, Jenny.

**Igualmente, gracias a Paul Aponte y Betty Sánchez de “Círculo de poetas & Writers” (SFBA) y “Escritores del Nuevo Sol”, Sacramento por su ayuda con las fotos que aquí se incluyen.  
  
© Poetry, Graciela Brauer Ramírez, de su libro: Educación: Una Épica Chicana

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. 

by ​Ivan Argüelles 

​
so folds the old year its broken diseased leaves 
its tripartite reconfigurations of an exiled sky 
its functionless attributes of lungs and bellows 
days like felled beasts hamstrings cut ears lopped 
days immersed in prussic acid and forged moon-dust 
atavistic months trapped in their own circularity 
unable to mouth their own unpronounceable names  
nor to rectify the phonetic damage done to their shapes 
seasons withered by oppositions of gas and distance 
like mountains collapsing into invisible lakes 
hemorrhaging light from their invariable wounds 
speaking like statues in a void no sleep can enter 
the enormous effigies of history shadowing copies 
of heroes and nameless saints down corridors 
and embankments where stricken cities grieve 
how much was lost in the fiction of calendar time 
the manipulations of politicians and bankers  
homophones of the great solar disk turned black ! 
like the serpent tail in mouth devouring its own being 
spirit without clouds animus of destroyed wharfs 
scripts of tattered glyph and cuneiform high and loud 
in atmospheres poisoned by future shareholders 
planets and asterisks commas and circumflex accents 
dizzying spirals hermetic consonants sung on one note 
vowels redder than the voice of no-beginnings 
impossibility of medical science to redefine the sound 
issuing from the late cycle’s numinous accident of birth 
and now !? and now the inarticulate diapason of darkness 
the lengthening afternoon without windows or hills 
the absolute innocence of door-posts and gate-swings 
paths that lead inward eradicated by technology 
everyone spying on everyone else using progress 
to justify the abyss into which uncountable beings fall 
never to be recovered and memory itself the bereaved 
ear and eye without meaning in the blank effusion 
when rock fragment and cliff reassert their primacy 
how many are the distances denied by this passing 
minutes and hours thumbs and echelons of ink 
dissolution of the orient—why move on into the plunge 
this is not next year but the single and only music 
to be recorded before electricity fails and doomed 
spacecraft earth turns to enigmatic azure powders 
you are my sunshine my only sunshine 
 
12-31-20! 

​Ivan Argüelles is an American innovative poet whose work moves from early Beat and surrealist-influenced forms to later epic-length poems. He received the Poetry Society of America’s William Carlos Williams Award in 1989 as well as the Before Columbus Foundation’s American Book Award in 2010.  In 2013, Argüelles received the Before Columbus Foundation’s Lifetime Achievement Award. For Argüelles the turning point came with his discovery of the poetry of Philip Lamantia. Argüelles writes, “Lamantia’s mad, Beat-tinged American idiom surrealism had a very strong impact on me. Both intellectual and uninhibited, this was the dose for me.” While Argüelles’s early writings were rooted in neo-Beat bohemianism, surrealism, and Chicano culture, in the nineties he developed longer, epic-length forms rooted in Pound’s Cantos and Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. He eventually returned, after the first decade of the new millennium, to shorter, often elegiac works exemplary of Romantic Modernism. Ars Poetica is a sequence of exquisitely-honed short poems that range widely, though many mourn the death of the poet’s celebrated brother, José.

​Reconocimiento 
 
Hacía bocetos.
Aquí y allá una palabra.
Después todo fue simple,
un fuego interior que lo consumió de golpe.
Al poco tiempo, un exilio impuesto.
Después un cambio de fotografías
y un borrón en la fecha de nacimiento.
Bordes geográficos desvaneciéndose y confundidos
en garabatos infantiles, y voces,
voces infinitas en asedio.
Esperas.
Reconstruyes tu perfil y tu acento,
vuelves a entrar en tu pasado,
permaneces en uno de sus rincones,
recorres los barrios de sus excesos,
y nunca eres un huésped inoportuno,
eso nunca te lo perdonarías.
 

 
Recognition 
 
He made sketches.
Here and there a word.
Later on it was all-simple:
an inner fire gobbled him up.
A little later, an imposed exile,
Later on, different photographs
and a blotch over his birthdate.
Geographic lines faded and interchanged
over infantile scribbles, and voices,
infinite voices laying siege.
You wait.
You redesign your profile and your accent,
you reach the past,
you settle into one of its corners,
you stroll the neighborhood of your excesses,
and you're not an inopportune guest,
you'd never forgive yourself that.

​El oratorio de Aurelia 
 
La primera mirada es una mano en movimiento. Una gaveta se abre, otra se cierra, y así combinaciones imposibles del cuerpo. Un trapecio de lo familiar, del perchero y la colcha de la abuela. Cortinas donde se esconde la niñez, esas cortinas rojas del teatro, y el show del circo imaginario para mayores de ocho años. Sabiduría del acróbata y del pintor en su gotear de rojos y esos verdes y esos amarillos. Casi se pueden tocar. Entonces, los waltzes pirotécnicos, los abrigos y vestidos con vida propia, la música de acordeón, tangojazz, y trombón, eso parece. Y cuando todo se ha vuelto un Magritte, el timbre de un móvil desata una pelea violenta entre los otros, audiencia de marionetas crueles.
 
Fin de la primera parte.
 

Aurelia's Oratorio
  
At first glance, it's a hand in motion. A drawer opens, another closes, and thereby impossible body combinations. A trapeze of the familiar, of the hanger and Grandma's bedspread. Curtains where childhood hides, those red curtains of the theater, and the show of the imaginary circus for those over eight. Wisdom of the acrobat and the painter in his splashing of reds and those greens and those yellows. You can almost touch them. Then the pyrotechnic waltzes, the coats and dresses coming to life, accordion music, tangojazz and trombone, that's what it's like. And when everything has turned into a Magritte, the ring of a cellphone unleashes a violent fight among the others, audience of cruel marionettes.
 
End of part one.
 
 
The poem “Aurélia’s Oratorio” alludes to the theater piece of the same name, a combination of a magic surreal show and acrobatics created and directed by Victoria Thierrée Chaplin that her daughter Aurélia Thierrée performs with extraordinary mastery and grace in theaters around the world.

Nueve poemas para Charlotte
 
1. Agrietadas de pasión, las manos del titiritero descansan.
Sólo en un pestañear, las marionetas se mueven y se confunden,
y se enredan en sus cuerdas. Conmoción de un instante.
  
2. Dentro del armario, la sombra de un antiguo Pinocchio es una marca
perenne. Así se hace la memoria y eso es lo mejor de todo, dejar que
el corazón se fragmente con el tacto. Lo inexistente ha dejado un recuento.
  
3. Sus labios en una taza de té. Un sabor verde de Himalayas
se confunde con la vasija terracota curtida por el uso.
Capas y capas de residuos, testigos impregnados en el barro.
Pone a un lado su diario. Mapa Mundi.
  
4. Su nombre reaparece en diferentes formas. En caligrafía es trazo
llamado Tao. Su efímera inscripción lleva la espiritualidad de los sentidos.
Digo y cuento, aunque raras veces es también toque de inscripción propia.
  
5. Puertas hinchadas de aguas a destiempo, como si la torrencial lluvia se hubiese vuelto un dulce y pegajozo delirio mientras observas las vestiduras extraviadas de la madera. En la ventana, una silente figura vacila. Y de pronto, el espacio de sonidos se confunde con grises, blancos y verdes.
Lo de afuera entra y roza tus manos.
  
6. Ella, la que eres tú en ciertos días, deja un rastro de bruma y se reclina sobre varios senderos. Atrapar lo inasible se vuelve aquí furor y apatía.
  
7. Pasas bordeando voces. No quieres quedarte en la orilla de la muerte.
Como un animal ebrio de miedo te enroscas hasta que la lluvia cese.
Palabras en desorden. Trabalenguas.
  
8. Tú misma eres una abstracción. Todos los remedios disolviéndose. Noches de insomnio cercanas a la locura. Así tu cuerpo. Las treguas conjuradas. La parálisis un abismo de telas. La corrugada pesantez de tu espalda mancillada por bloques terapeúticos.
  
9. Mientras intocable hasta en la palabra, la presión de dedos y el aire denso de lugar a lugar, a tus labios coarteados les frotas unas gotas de miel y los pules como si fueran un desgarrón purpúreo. Así tus huesos, nervaduras de sombras chinescas lanzadas al piso. Tú.
 


​Nine Poems for Charlotte 

1. Cracked by passion, the puppeteer’s hands rest.
With only a blink, the marionettes move and are baffled,
and get tangled in their cords. The commotion of an instant.
  
2. Inside the wardrobe, the shadow of an ancient Pinocchio
is a perennial imprint. This is how memory is made and that’s the best of it
all, to allow the heart into pieces if touched. The non-existent has left a trace.
  
3. Her lips sipping a cup of tea. A Himalayas’ green flavor
is fused with the terracotta cup stained by use.
Residual layers and layers, witnesses impregnated in the clay.
She puts aside her diary. Mapa Mundi.
  
4. Her name reappears in different ways. In calligraphy it’s a pen stroke
called Tao. Its ephemeral inscription carries the spirituality of the senses.
I say and tell, although rarely it’s also a touch of self-inscription.
  
5. Doors swollen by untimely waters, as if the torrential rain had become
a sweet and clinging frenzy while you observes the lost garments of the
wood. In the window, a silent figure hesitates. And suddenly, the space of
sounds blends with grays, whites and greens.
The outside comes in and grazes your hands.
  
6. She, the one you are on certain days, leaves a trace of mist and bends,
over several paths. Here to grasp the unreachable is fury and apathy.
  
7. You stroll around voices. Not wanting to remain on the verge of death.
Like an animal drunk with fear you huddle until the rain stops.
Words in disorder. Tongue Twisters.
  
8. You are yourself an abstraction. All solutions are dissolving.
Nights of insomnia close to madness. So is your body. Conjured ceasefires.
Paralysis, an abyss of cloths. The corrugated and heaviness of your back
sullied by therapeutic blocks.
 
9. While untouchable even by words, the pressure of fingers and the
misty air from place to place, onto your cracked lips you rub some drops of
honey and you polish them like a purplish tear. And your bones, too, Chinese
shadows nervures tossed on the floor. You.

Bosques de Bélgica 
 
Voz suelta. Pura respiración.
Labios de breves heridas.
Después, un tañido.
 
Boca sobre el metal. Voz hueca
y los labios un pico abierto de pájaro.
El aire es murmullos, rumores, silbidos,
y marca permanente en la cámara interio.
Rapidez del movimiento de la vara, privilegio de una mano.
La mano tiene forma de U. Es una U.
 
En el cielo de Berkeley hay pocas nubes,
decías lentamente.
Cierto, el aerófono es latón ligero,
tríptico en un cuadro donde un trombón de vara
parece pájaro en vuelo y alas de ángel.
 
¿Quién recuerda el nombre del cuadro?
¿Cómo se llamaba el pintor?

 
Belgian Forests 
 
Voice unleashed. Pure breathing.
Lips of brief wounds.
Then, a note.
 
Mouth to metal. Hollow voice
and lips a bird's open beak.
The air murmurs, whispers, whistles,
and permanently marks the inner chamber.
Rapidity of the valve's movement
privilege of a hand.
The hand is U shaped. It’s a U.
 
In the Berkeley sky, here are few clouds,
you were saying slowly.
True, the aerophone is a light brass
triptych in a painting where a valved trombone
looks like a bird in flight, and angel wings.
 
Who remembers what the painting is called?
What was the painter's name?

​Carlota Caulfield is a Cuban-born American poet, writer, translator and literary critic. She has published extensively in English and Spanish in the United States, Latin America and Europe. Her most recent poetry books are Cuaderno Neumeister / The Neumeister Notebook (2016) and Los juguetes de Bertrand / Bertrand’s Toys (2019). She is the recipient of several awards, among them The International Poetry Prize Dulce María Loynaz and The Ultimo Novecento, Poets of the World. Caulfield has also published
widely on Argentine poet Alejandra Pizarnik, as well as on other Latin American and Latinx poets, including Magali Alabau and Juana Rosa Pita. She is the co-editor of A Companion to US Latino Literatures (2012 &2014) and Barcelona, Visual Culture, Space & Power (2012 & 2014). She is Professor of Spanish and Spanish American Studies at Mills College, Oakland, California. 

​Mary G. Berg, a Resident Scholar at the Women’s Studies Research Center at Brandeis University, Boston, Massachusetts, has translated poetry by Juan Ramón Jiménez, Clara Roderos, Marjorie Agosín and Carlota Caulfield and novels by Martha Rivera (I’ve Forgotten Your Name), Laura Riesco (Ximena at the Crossroads), Libertad Demitropulos (River of Sorrows). Her most recent translations are of collections of stories by Olga Orozco and Laidi Fernández de Juan.

Català: Hernan Cortés lluita amb dos indis by Antoni Gómez i Cros  (1809–1863) 

Historia Verdadera de la Conquista

great cadavers of heat circulating
like unspoken romance dialects in the ivy
& to sleep in summer’s ornate diphthong 
yielding to the profound ampersand
woven into the nexus of eyelid and sight –
why go on piercing darkness with 
Toltec lightning riding cordilleras that
differ from Spanish or Sanskrit as much as
distance diverges from the porphyry of longing ?
inversions of the horse and swart perspiration
armor soldered to glistening herculean frames 
and the flotilla of imported hills charging surf
the whiteness of the outer rim the deep indigo
that is fatal to the eye the immensities of cobalt
even as its avenues sprawl into nopal underbrush
flowers fired from archaic muskets like troops
of cloud-elephants prepared to seize the continent
blinding whatever passes for light in the gloaming
boomerang and volcano and ninety-degree alcohol 
when skies did battle with skies !
the ungovernable envelope of siglo de oro
with its plethora of misdirected synonyms
shepherds and avatars of lazar-house gods
the unique digit that transforms sound into space
echo after echo of an unheard Basque consonant
ready to detonate the lacerated backside of Cuba
the life of the ear and its golden assonance 
in the rushing welter of oceans on the other side
of the perforated and pearly Lobe
ringing syllabic disunities in rock and moss
mufti and corduroy of the managerial knees
sequences of traffic racing the invisible storms of Tampico
where gun-runners and affidavits of bright toxicity
lounge half-drunk in the ravaged tropical greenery
saliva and boredom of the new ruling class
borrowed gypsum thoughts heaving mountain-peaks
dialects of Chapultepec childhoods the works
hobbling with Franciscan mountebanks from the Old Country
gringo hospice dereliction of the Carretera Panamericana
where it is always the summer of 1953 BCE 
when the twins besieged the Popol Vuh motel 
ransacking dust and brick the bath of fame inches
within the insect who bears History on its carapace
and corn fields planted with munitions and
the unending Communist Revolution of Cuauhtémoc
the motor buried deep in Xochimilco floral beds
water follows water into the reverse of the leaf
whose exhausting idiom divides night 
into the multiple hemispheres of Oblivion
 
10-14-20

LAS AZOTEAS DE TENOCHTITLÁN  

half way through time in the center of space  
all directions go from the meridian straight north 
avoiding south where the dead thrive on monosyllables 
and the third hemisphere of time is shortened  
by the inch of light it takes to cross sleep’s boundaries  
mortals puzzle over birth and etymologies 
the eye’s memories are a confused reticulation 
a brief phase in eternity’s unfinished ant-hill  
dark labyrinth of coagulated stars and waters 
spectral resonance of the unfinished noon of marble 
when nothing moves but an incremental shimmer 
glare and intimation of a sun too soon blackened 
by coruscating elements of an aggravated city 
traffic of bacchants and hieroglyphs totem Spaniards 
who have left behind Galatea and her phantom shepherds 
for the colossal gold bricks and unstemmed tide of silver 
for the canals of sacred sewage Aztec immolated stone 
the top and pinnacle of a single multicolored plume 
signaling the end to the first day of a tropical infinity 
bulwark of crescent shaped frogs hidden in San Ángel 
the possibility that a new year might begin at last 
frame of water shivering Toltec vowels embossed 
in a mental armor the blaze and rutilation of horses 
climbing bone masses and the bruited nonsense 
of cadavers by the thousands left to be counted 
by augurs who imitate almanacs and friezes 
depicting enormous Revolutionary symphonies memory 
of children left to dry on rooftops with bleached linens 
sacrosanct rags panoply of rust and sugar skulls deaths 
by the hundreds with tiny horns blowing hats and wings 
terrific parades of cinematic automobiles Dolores del Rio 
the saint who ate the pyramids the offal of transgression 
mimics and sinners liars at the wheel Porfirio Díaz fading 
in the photograph of the Volcano and its slattern wives 
gesture of a phonetic pistolero to gain his daily share 
bread divided into fractions of oxygen and kneeless penitents 
of Guanajuato looking for the Surgeon of Nayarit 
who will soon be knocking at the door flummoxed and  
insensate with pulque the famous red margin of the Hours 
draping the pharmacy windows and the blow-out of night 
furious and intellectual the dialectic of darkness  
smoke and unending neologisms about the Life eternal 
to be sought somewhere in El Norte fiction of Hollywood 
countless abandoned motors and skins the frontera 
where the scales of justice tilt gagging on days-old urine 
cycles of pathos and iceberg lettuce spine chilling 
dreams recollecting the azoteas de Tenochtitlán  
Chabela and her amazing ink-spent hair the wind  
that takes its ropes and ties them around the Cathedral 
lifting from earth the archaic architecture of oblivion 
while worms with the mistaken eyes of devastated gods 
who live on cigarettes and cerveza in cantinas 
of peeling wallpaper and fly-swatters create words 
circular and soundless echoes tinny subtractions  
discarded illegible typescript on onion skin History 
 
10-19-20

POEM IN THE SHAPE OF AN INVISIBLE VOLCANO 
             para mis amigos de Somos en Escrito 
lava flowers colored like evening’s red and gold 
cities crescent-shaped and buried in a trance of cinders 
elevated ruins of the only remaining statue of Persephone 
elegance of hands cut from their pulse and shadowless 
Moorish architecture of the eyebrows of Vanity 
symbolism and margin of all phonetic errors 
power of silent detonations deep within the heart 
and clamoring for meat of the soul those denied passion 
stars divided in half at the molten strike of noon  
rhapsodies of words that have more sound than meaning 
the shapeless intuition of light to transcend itself 
in a glorious burst of sunflowers and solar homophones 
the tryst of lunatic and aphasic in the sewers of Tenochtitlán 
rain in porphyry torrents pouring from a cloudless sky 
and mortals like blind birds circling their own destruction 
with the tiny feet of a lost poetic meter and bewailing 
the day when thunder and mountain joined forces 
men who believed the sea was only a hemisphere of sleep 
and waves always feminine and plural were at the root 
of the enigma caused by consciousness at birth 
etymologies of distance and repercussion like drum-rolls 
in the faint ear of the adolescent afternoon assassin 
was love ever more futile and gorgeous in its escape ? 
sentient ovals of the moon in its perpetual fade 
aspirin and silken ropes that tie the shadow down 
to a body that has only existed in pharaonic dreams 
the constant disrepair of language  
illiteracy of the gramophone and sewing machine 
the enormous and inexplicable circularities of heat 
coupled with the mysterious rumors of mummies 
grief ! legends of the half-formed antiquities of rock 
tragic association of the sorrowing trigger finger 
and the dizzying instamatic nature of fire-flies 
death over and over in small print at the bottom  
and pages of water and fluid discrepancies of thought 
rushing in all directions with nowhere to go 
skies decrepit with the gods of mistaken pronouns 
oracle and augury and spit-fire demons wayward desires 
the entire panoply of historic deviation  
one by one the children and the dead going south 
volumes of unused scripts the crying at the end 
the sadness of leaves bereft of their own speech 
the longing and drift of undetected planets 
asleep forever between eons of galactic despair 
 
10-25-20 

THE SYMPOSIUM 
                        “Oímos por espejos” 
                              Lorca 
this afternoon we discuss the state of poetry 
the archaic oriental ancient unfinished rock formation 
cliffs of rumor compacted into a few variable sounds 
the one you left behind in sleep is greater for  
its absence and the one you keep repeating as 
you stutter is the divine syllable not meant for human 
mirrors the ear and its occidental other stilled 
by a single blade of grass symbol of darkening 
and grief and as you pause for a moment sitting there 
discussing the state and condition of the already ruined 
art of the incomplete you have second thoughts 
it didn’t come from Ionia it wasn’t even in existence 
when they came over the Hindu Kush maybe it’s 
not polite to maintain this symposium and the others 
ragged hermaphrodites with bodies borrowed from 
some pre-Christian novel you oppose the direction 
their loosened vowels are taking projecting solemn auguries 
about the flight of skies about the inverted afternoons of Hades 
the Stygian helmsman and his broken oars the overloaded 
verses of tempest and bird-wing the adorned and adorable 
dead putti the fringes of sound the mind in its vocabulary 
of hesitation and phonetic spectra how is one to sleep  
with a head full of abracadabra and nonsensical whims 
about the origins of the Muses mountain born and 
dressed like kites or quicksilver inspirations to song 
and dance the nodding epithets and glories whatever 
the discussion is not straightforward drunken tousle-haired 
young men with skins of antelope or leopard how graceful 
their presences which just as soon disintegrate and the volume 
turned way up and cigarette chatter and gods of the sudden 
entrance appearing and disappearing clatter junk and 
long draughts of mescal and what can you do your fingers 
isolated from the rhymes and meters and a host 
of Latin pejoratives and dialect of rumor and repercussion 
the sea comes up to your knees and sunsets of Spanish gold 
and the vitriol of lovers who envy and nothing more 
what is there to explain and the anthologies spill open 
flower-fields and names like Eurydice or Beatrice 
abound and you look over your shoulder at Night 
secretive and whispering into a bottle that holds 
the Sybil green and upside-down vatic maniac tongue 
that none can understand the very bedlam and manicomio 
that poetry should be you try to assert but for 
the nymphs holding up drowned Hylas and the rivers 
rushing to lose identity and name and the Chaos 
of all human endeavor the critics and circus-masters 
naysayers and idolaters the fashion-worshippers 
and finally tiny and redundant in appearance the Rishis 
naked and dazed smeared with Vedic mantras uttering 
and stammering with their knees the ultimate truths 
the One and the Many and the Goddess the shimmer 
of distance and Echo her manifold faces and hair 
but for a moment visible before all the smoke and ashes 
and Memory disappear and left alone in an Empty Room 
you with the ghosts of Longing and Leaf 
Silencio !

 
10-28-20 

​​Ivan Argüelles is a Mexican-American innovative poet whose work moves from early Beat and surrealist-influenced forms to later epic-length poems. He received the Poetry Society of America’s William Carlos Williams Award in 1989 as well as the Before Columbus Foundation’s American Book Award in 2010.  In 2013, Argüelles received the Before Columbus Foundation’s Lifetime Achievement Award. For Argüelles the turning point came with his discovery of the poetry of Philip Lamantia. Argüelles writes, “Lamantia’s mad, Beat-tinged American idiom surrealism had a very strong impact on me. Both intellectual and uninhibited, this was the dose for me.” While Argüelles’s early writings were rooted in neo-Beat bohemianism, surrealism, and Chicano culture, in the nineties he developed longer, epic-length forms rooted in Pound’s Cantos and Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. He eventually returned, after the first decade of the new millennium, to shorter, often elegiac works exemplary of Romantic Modernism. Ars Poetica is a sequence of exquisitely-honed short poems that range widely, though many mourn the death of the poet’s celebrated brother, José.

ADELA NAJARRO

THE POET: IN HER OWN WORDS
​
I was born in San Francisco, and then around the age of four or five we moved to the Los Angeles area. We lived in many L.A. suburbs, Downey, Pico Rivera, Cerritos, and Torrance. We moved around a lot. I went to a different school almost every year. I learned to adapt and understand U.S. suburban culture. I also learned how all fluctuates and is indeterminate. 

My love of writing and ability to play between two languages arose from the randomness of my childhood. My early years were filled with what can best be termed chaotic love, and so I came to understand how the world is not set in one place, language, or mode of seeing, which just happens to be the perfect upbringing for a poet in a post-modern world! I have done a lot of inner work analyzing and articulating my childhood. My family, my memories, mi pasado, fuel my poems, though perhaps not directly in a one-to-one translated narrative. 

My early memories focus on my father. In one, he is carrying me from the car to the house. My head rests on his shoulder and I have my arms wrapped around his neck. We lived in San Francisco, at the time. We are going up the stairs to the door. In the other, I am in the same doorway, and someone asks my name. I reply “Adelita.” He tells me that my name is Adela and that Adelita is a term of endearment used in the family. Of course, he didn’t use those words since I must have been around four years old and this would have taken place in Spanish. I also have a memory of standing at the top of a street in San Francisco and looking down. I fear falling. 

My parents and grandparents were born in Nicaragua. Some of my cousins were born here in the U.S. while others were born in Nicaragua. Nearly all family members are now living in the United States. I’m sure there are a few distant cousins in Nicaragua. I don’t know them, but I would like to. Instead, what I do is travel to Nicaragua through my imagination—what was Nicaragua like for my mother, my father, mis abuelas? I love to imagine los pericos in the tropical rainforest and iguanas sunbathing in the branches of barren trees.
 
I have always written. I have memories of writing poems in elementary school. I write to understand my place in the world

THE POET'S BIO
​
Adela Najarro is the author of three poetry collections: Split Geography, Twice Told Over and My Childrens, a chapbook that includes teaching resources. With My Childrens she hopes to bring Latinx poetry into the high school and college classroom so that students can explore poetry, identity, and what it means to be a person of color in US society. Her extended family’s emigration from Nicaragua to San Francisco began in the 1940’s and concluded in the eighties when the last of the family settled in the Los Angeles area.

She currently teaches creative writing, literature, and composition at Cabrillo College, and is the English instructor for the Puente Project, a program designed to support Latinidad in all its aspects, while preparing community college students to transfer to four-year colleges and universities. Every spring semester, she teaches a “Poetry for the People,” workshop at Cabrillo College where students explore personal voice and social justice through poetry and spoken word.

She holds a doctorate in literature and creative writing from Western Michigan University, as well as an M.F.A. from Vermont College, and is widely published in numerous anthologies and literary magazines. Her poetry appears in the University of Arizona Press anthology The Wind Shifts: New Latino Poetry, and she has published poems in numerous journals, including Porter Gulch Review, Acentos Review, BorderSenses, Feminist Studies, Puerto del Sol, Nimrod International Journal of Poetry & Prose, Notre Dame Review, Blue Mesa Review, Crab Orchard Review, and elsewhere.

POEMS FROM TWICE TOLD OVER​​

Early Morning Chat with God

​This morning I’m back to asking for patience.
With my cup of coffee I sit outside to say hello
to you God, my Jiminy Cricket, my salsa
dancing quick-with-a-dip amigo. We have
a very collegial relationship. I laugh
at all your jokes and praise the wonders
of a sky’s watercolors. I know you like me,
a benign affection and tolerance as I run
around like a chicken with its head cut off,
a truly gruesome image, nevertheless
hilarious like a grisly cartoon. The blood spurting.
The body winding down to zero. The crashing
into unforeseen objects. I think if I
were back on my great-grandmother’s farm,
the farm that I know only through stories
my mother tells of Nicaragua, Bluefields,
a tortilla filled with just enough, and I saw
the long scrawny neck and the axe,
I would be sick to my stomach: the aimlessness
of her final strut, the reality of blood
loss, her claws scratching the dirt, kicking up rocks,
a panic. But when she stops, into the pot
she goes. A meal, what we need to continue,
her flesh simmered off the bone. Truly delicious
in a tomato sauce flavored with green peppers
and onions. Transformation. The feathers
plucked, soil and dust washed away. The table set.
Goblets of red wine, white china plates,
a cast iron pot twirling a bay leaf
scented steam. Then a prayer and gratitude
that we have enough to make it through
another night alone, a night filled with longing
whispers and the turbulence of dreams.

​​Between Two Languages

Misericordia translates to mercy,
as in God have mercy on our souls.
Ten piedad, pity us the poor and suffering,
the lost and broken. Have mercy. Ten piedad.
Misericordia, a compassionate
forgiveness, carries within
miseria, misery, the stifled cry
on a midnight bus to nowhere,
and yes, the hunger, a starless night’s
piercing howl, the shadows within shadows
under a freeway overpass, the rage
that God might be laughing, or even
worse, silent, gone, a passing hallucination.
Our nerve-wracked bodies tremble.
Our eyes have trouble peering into night.
Let us hope for more than can possibly be.
Señor, ten misericordia de nosotros.
And if we are made in the image of God,
then we can begin heading toward
the ultimate zero, the void
that is not empty, forgive ourselves,
and remember the three
seconds when we caught a glimpse
of someone else’s stifling cry.
Compassion, then miseria, our own
misery intensified by the discordant
ringing of some other life. Our ultimate
separation. Our bodies intolerably
unable to halt the cacophonous
clamor of unanswered prayers.
But nevertheless we must try
for no reason at all. Once more,
Señor, ten misericordia de nosotros,
forgive us for what we cannot do.

Redlands

I'm coming to the conclusion that I'm simple,
like my mother, my grandmother, father. All of them
from Nicaragua where time goes back further.
Here, wagons and rifles, the prairie plowed
 
into fields of soybeans and sunflowers. Sunken wood
barns and tombstones rattle as a six-by-six tractor-trailer
rumbles through exit 41a and on past peach cobbler,
a shot of Jim Beam Whiskey, and the Stop'n'Go, 7-11,
 
Circle K, whatever name on that one corner, in that one
place, where someone calls the intersection of a convenience store
and a gas station their town, their home, their grass. Paint or
aluminum siding. A kitchen and carpet. Photos
 
of Aunt Edna and Uncle Charlie. That summer Chuck
went for a ride on a Harley under redwoods and past
cool stream shadows while Julie, as little girl, slept
in a Ford station wagon. Faded blue. Wood paneling
 
peeling open to rust. The back flipped down
for her and Ursa Major poured out sky.
 
*
 
In Nicaragua the colors are electric water in air.
The weight of clouds on winged cockroaches
and crocodiles in streams. La Virgen de Guadalupe. My cousin,
Maria Guadalupe Sanchez, on a bike with Brenda through
 
a suburb of Managua on the handlebars. The streets
were Miguel, her brother, with a rifle shooting iguanas
from a tree in a pickup or Jeep. The huge overbearing
green of myriad plants inching their way past
 
monkeys and chickens to a patio whitewashed
and cool. The distance away from grandmother. Actually
great-grandmother and her son, the witch doctor
who could stop malaria with powder or a gaze
 
into trembling hearts. The known ancient crossing 
to psychology, biology, chemistry. The workings
of ourselves. A railroad blasted through mountain.
 
*
 
I want to dance during the Verbenas. I don't know the word
or correct spelling. V or a B? Just a sound from a one-time visit
to Nicaragua. A celebration. A truck lined with palm fronds
in a parade, then dancing. At three in the morning,
 
it was still warm. Verbenas. An old colonial colonel's name?
A street? A time to celebrate the harvest of bananas, yucca,
corn, beans? I don't know. There was a monkey on a leash,
on the roof. The tiles curved from Tía Teresa and Tío Rafael
 
to me being pretty sitting at a table with my first rum and coke.
The loss of my virginity was to be a golden icon mined
from history where my grandfather was a child hidden
under a loose brown skirt and delivered to a convent. Mi abuelita
 
with her eight kids. My aunts and uncles. My mother with us.
In college with Philip, a boy standing naked looking out
a window, his butt prettier than mine, it was California.
There were palm trees. I was correctly 18. I had gone to visit
 
Planned Parenthood. The ladies behind a desk were asking
questions and taking notes. With a brown paper bag
I waited on grass, in the park, knowing already Interstate 80
divides this nation in two, beginning in San Francisco
 
cutting straight through to New Jersey on the Atlantic Coast. 

IN CONVERSATION: ADELA NAJARRO (AN) AND LUCHA CORPI (LC) 

LC: Adela, I have enjoyed listening to you read some of your poems a few times. Mostly, when we happened to coincide at meetings and readings sponsored by Escritores del nuevo sol in  Sacramento and Círculo de poetas and Writers in Oakland. It’s been a treat every time. But quite a double and triple treat now to read and reread your exquisite poetry in solitude, as I prepare for our charla here today.  And I am in awe, not just for this pleasure of hearing and reading your poetry. I have also had the opportunity to see you organize public events with an ease that never ceases to amaze me. Also because reading your biographical material I realize that you are a wife, mother, indefatigable professor, community organizer, a “dynamo” poet… and so much more.
 
Above, in your biographical information of your early years, you close your narrative with a line that immediately held my attention: “I write to understand my place in the world.” Could you elaborate?
 
AN: That arises from the idea that poetry is discovery. A rant, a diatribe, a polemic , all make statements about what is already known. The rant is yelling, screaming, crying on the page over events that have happened; the diatribe is an attack; the polemic tries to convince through astute argument. All of these begin from a standpoint of knowing, knowing how one has been wronged, knowing the wrong itself, and knowing how to correct and proceed. That’s not poetry. Poetry has to begin with an open mind that follows language into a discovery or truth. It is through writing that I discover the truth of what surrounds me, in the past, the present, and even in the future; in that sense I come to understand my place in the world.

I have no fear. If the truth I find is one of betrayal, hatred, violence, anger, then that is a part of the world I live in. Even so, it surprises me over and over, how writing always takes me to hope. Even when I write about issues that have broken others or myself, I always find beauty. Maybe it’s about being alive, being able to breathe, being able to wake up one more day. Praise God and sing Hallelujah! Poetry and religion merge onto the same roadway in that they both seek the human spirit and lead us to compassion, again, our place in the world.
 
LC: In “Redlands, California,” you tell the story of living in the United States while imaging life in Nicaragua. Could you talk about the context you had in mind when you imagine a homeland, Nicaragua, that you don’t know since you grew up in the United States?
 
AN: My brain developed a duality of language and culture as I grew up. I learned English in pre-school while my first language was Spanish. I was living in U.S. Anglo culture while at home it was all about Nicaragua. So—"Los dos fit better than one alone.” That’s my line from “Conversation with Rubén Darío's ‘Eco y yo’,” which was first published in Nimrod International Journal of Poetry & Prose and appears in my collection, Twice Told Over.

Los dos. I view myself in terms of Whitman and Anzaldúa in that I contain multitudes in my mestizaje. I seek an American literary tradition that contains the Anglo, the male, the Latinx, female, and all the range between. There is no set answer, just the flux of words, our thoughts, the daily wakening to a new day that somehow seems old and familiar.

“Redlands, California,” has three sections, the first is about life in the States; in the second, I imagine life in Nicaragua; the final section tries to create a new juxtaposition between these two states of being, and, of course, it ties in with sex because what else captures the union of two distinct bodies?

The Nicaragua I know is the Nicaragua of my imagination and that of the stories told by my parents, abuelitas, cousins, tías y tíos. I tell and retell their stories to bring them into the literary conversation of the Americas. They matter. They are part of the American story. As a writer it falls to me to create poems that capture this duality of language, culture, immigration, las penas and the joy.
 
LC:  Tell us what you will about your creative process. Do you sit down to write at certain times of the day on certain days? What happens if you get inspired while driving or in other similar situations? Do you memorize the lines for the time you finally write the poem where they belong? Or hope for the best?
 
AN: There was a time when I wrote nearly non-stop. I remember being at a job training and writing a poem. I have written poems on napkins. I have written using big orange markers. I feared that if I stopped writing, then the Muse or inspiration would vanish. But it never has. As I accepted that writing was part of my identity, of who I am, and what makes Adela, Adela, I took a couple of days off. Then I wrote about those days. Then I took a few more days off, then wrote new poems. Eventually, I realized that my mind collects ideas, images, language, every waking and sleeping moment. When I sit down to write, it comes out. Then the work becomes revision. Editing. Cutting that which doesn’t belong and expanding that which is hidden, all the while finding the exact words and rhythms. Doesn’t that sound like joy? It is to me. When I write, I am at one with everything. I accept whatever shows up. The pain, the horror, the laughter, the jokes, the image. Right now there is an owl in the eucalyptus tree outside my bedroom patio. Earlier coyotes were howling at sirens, not the moon, but sirens. Someone on their way to a hospital. Tomorrow, a mint leaf will open in a pot. There are spiders in the eaves. Every waking moment holds something and then the world of dreams, the imagination, the possibilities. Here are the final lines to “Conversation with Rubén Darío's ‘Eco y yo’”:
 
Out of the delirium,
the sweat, the anxiety of every morning,
we weave a soft and tender sea,
 
the mermaids, the song,
 
the possibility,
 
and all begins again.

*** 

Thank you Lucha for this conversation. It is always such a pleasure to see you and collaborate! Hasta la proxíma.
 
Mil gracias, Adela.
 
​
© Adela Najarro: the poems that appear in this interview are from Twice Told Over, published by Unsolicited Press, 2015, with permission of the author.
More information about Adela can be found at her website: 
www.adelanajarro.com.

2020

1.
De niños, junto a un faro, nos creíamos
que ante la oscuridad y las tormentas
los barcos precisaban de la luz.
Hoy sabemos que éramos nosotros
los que más se ayudaban de esa creencia.
 
Tal vez sea mejor
que todo siga su cauce:
dejar de imaginar, de escribir,
dejar que, incluso en contra suya,
todo siga su cauce.
 
2.
En ocasiones nada es la mejor solución:
comprobar, sin más, que los días
       se engarzan a una arena infalible,
que denigrados los libros
       desertan de los estantes,
que prematuramente los cuerpos
       se avienen a la ceniza
       —los ojos, al vacío—,
que no sirve ya la pregunta
de cuál es o cuál podría ser…,
ni tampoco la respuesta
de que en ocasiones nada
—este poema incluido--
sea la mejor solución.

REVERSO

Reconocer nuestra parcialidad
       nos hace imparciales:
creernos imparciales
       nos lleva a la parcialidad.
 
«Oíd, amigos, la revolución ha fracasado.
Subid las campanas de nuevo al campanario,
devolvedle la sotana al cura y al capataz el látigo»,
escribió León Felipe hace décadas sin incluir
el siguiente reverso tan familiar:
 
Camaradas, oíd: La revolución ha triunfado.
Subid el nuevo (es un decir) pendón al campanario,
y sin dejar de aplaudir a los torcidos
funcionarios de turno, vedlos cómo se invisten
con la sotana del cura y el látigo del capataz.

Jesús J. Barquet, born in Havana, Cuba, arrived in the U.S. in 1980 via the Mariel Boatlift. He won the “Letras de Oro Prize” for his Consagración de La Habana (1991) and the “Lourdes Casal Prize” for his Escrituras poéticas de una nación (1998), and was Second Prize Winner of “Chicano-Latino Poetry” for his Un no rompido sueño (1994). Among his books of poetry are Sagradas herejías, Sin fecha de extinción, Aguja de diversos, and the compilation Cuerpos del delirio. He is founder and Editor in Chief of La Mirada publishing house since 2014.

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. ​