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​​SOMOS EN ESCRITO
The Latino Literary Online Magazine

POETRY
​POESÍA

"...being an immigrant’s daughter"

3/15/2020

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Political cartoon from the Chicago Tribune from 1914, Wikipedia.


​​Two poems from the colonies

By María Lysandra Hernández

oppression: how disney channel
is the best form of neocolonialism

in my high school, we rose in an ocean of plaid skirts and blue vests and placed our palms
over our hearts and tried to stand still, despite the itch of our noses and the passing of notes,
to listen to our anthems before assemblies, meetings, and model UN competitions;

my World History professor told us once before assembly to note the differences between
anthems,
and their hidden words between high notes we made fun once we paraded out the auditorium; I
too,

know the rockets had a red glare–yet my singer’s voice, inherited from my mariachi father, sings
it best; whereas my father’s anthem reveres Mexican cannon’s booms, and the US’s prides
“unlikely” war triumphs, my mother’s La Borinqueña praises the beauty uncovered–like a
bride’s once

unveiled–when finally dis-covered by conquistadors who had never seen such splendor, nor such
beaches, where they could settle and disseminate onto fertile land the will and command of the

Catholic queen; it starts off small, you see, taking symbols (like our uniforms) and calling it
mundane to not stand out but conform among the sea of historical anthems that inflate chests
with pride; and we’re taught how it’s a privilege to sing our anthem now since we couldn’t
before due to

laws like la Ley de Mordaza, law 53 of 1948, that gagged and killed those who carried our azul
celeste flags, those who sang our real anthem and songs, and those who even thought of
breathing

independent air, so now we should be grateful to be able to remember Columbus only wanted
our land for its beauty, be grateful that el Grito de Lares was unsuccessful in reaching
independence, be grateful we sing the United States’ anthem and we can sing the Hannah
Montana theme song

in perfect English and recognize Mickey Mouse before knowing the revolutionary anthem by
Lola Rodríguez de Tió and recognizing our own fallen leaders, we should be grateful that we
receive

American media content across the ocean, too, despite being disenfranchised from voting for the
next CEO of this American franchise, we should be grateful for the orange pedophillic hands that

handed us over paper towels to mop up rivers in our houses, we should be grateful, we should be
grateful, we should be grateful, we should be grateful, we should be grateful, we should be
grateful

the abc’s of being an immigrant’s daughter

agua de jamaica paints my lips and mouth
blood-red, like i’m dead. i find nostalgic
comfort in the broken plastic cup that is
dribbling, dripping down its berry-flavored
esperanza. recall the square i circled around as a
fumbling child? silly child, mumbling the longgone name for a patriarchal figure–broken masthead of family. we were decapitated after the
infernal heat of the immeasurable trek that
jostles spirits. odyssey on desert–not sea–seeking for any
kind hands to feed, caress. yet, only orange ones that
like to poison wells, appear with their ‘oh, wells,’
‘maybe later,’ and ‘bad hombres’ rhetoric. they
never try the exercise of recognizing countries that lie on
opposing continents. why would the people’s president
partake in any education other than indoctrination? why
question the binary of them vs. us? white vs. brown?
really, children of all ages, of all different faces,
seem to have fun: no parents allowed, sleeping in
tenebrous cages, tossing and turning over the hope of the
un-american dream. the eagle saves from villainous
vipers in deserts that slither across illegally
with evil intentions; yet no one mentions the
xoloitzcuintlis’ trips to chaperone the children who
yearned for golden gates, a familiar embrace–
zócalos are now too far to feel like home.

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​María Lysandra Hernández is a BA Writing, Literature and Publishing student with a minor in Global and Post-colonial Studies at Emerson College. She is currently the Head of Writing at Raíz Magazine, Emerson College’s bilingual and Latinx publication. For more poetry, you can find her on instagram at @marialysandrahern.
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My loss I call "isla"

5/23/2019

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​Rinconcito

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

Benediction: Three Poems

By Eric Morales-Franceschini

Isla ​

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

But woe to this trigueño body and to 

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

for memory holds at this and every other lonely hour 

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

for it defies all names and, thereby, all tenability 

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

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

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

if only I knew other names   

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

If only I had the decency to say no 

and heed to a reality as dry as bone 

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

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

Benediction   ​

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

for flesh and its miscellanea do speak loudly

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

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

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

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

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

A dissident etymology ​

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

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

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

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

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

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

1/1/2017

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​Poems 
of resistance 
and hope

​Excerpts from Vivas to Those Who Have Failed

By Martín Espada


The Right Foot of Juan de Oñate

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

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

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


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

Heal the Cracks in the Bell of the World

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

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

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

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

El Moriviví

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

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

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

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

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

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

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