​By Oswaldo Vargas


Why We Meet in the Milpa

Because it’s the closest thing to a chinampa

Where I can practice my slang
familiar to any sidewalk in Michoacán

Where language brushes its chin against me
What’s the word for razor burn
and my want for it to happen again?

Where the crew of comas gather to coordinate a trip to the beach

Where I can ask what’s the word
for the direction in which my parents’ ashes will blow

Where I wait for the next thing
to call a season
the thing you stick your tongue out in the lluvia for.

~~~~~~~~~~~

Where the Fishermen Love
I’m afraid of the day
you’ll swim miles out into the ocean
and won’t come back
The doctor says your blood
is too sweet
but there’s no barista to take the drink back to
No Apa
please blast the songs
I used to get embarrassed by
Teach me how to swim
so one day I too can join you
out where only fishermen love.

Oswaldo Vargas lives in Davis, California, where he attends the University of California, Davis, working towards a Bachelor’s Degree in History while also studying Human Rights and Jewish Studies. Previous publications include the Imaniman: Poets Writing in the Anzaldúan Borderlands anthology, Assaracus’s If You Can Hear This: Poems in Protest of an American Inauguration anthology, Raspa Magazine, Nepantla: Queer Poets of Color anthology, and Huizache. ​

By Bianca Paz

In my backyard is a fence,
It divides mothers from children,
It divides the collective art form of society,
It divides Mexico from US,
It divides.

“They take away our jobs,” they say
But when they are asked to clean the school hallways,
“It is someone else’s job for lower pay.”

Land of the free
But in order to flee,
Take a number please,
You are number one million, two hundred and six thousand, five hundred three.

You wait for years, but are still denied
They don’t understand you just need a place to hide, but
Unfortunately you have a cousin on red, white, and green’s lower south side.

All you want is a better,
Life
Without guns yelling outside your front door,
Without murders and neighbors being turned into whores,
Without the constant suffocation of this drug war.

In my backyard is a fence,
It divides mothers from children,
It divides the collective art form of society,
It divides Mexico from US,
It divides.
Life from death.

But they will not let you cross to,
Live. ​
​

​Bianca Paz, who grew up in Brownsville, Texas, is enrolled at Concordia University, Austin, Texas, toward a major in communications and a minor in writing, which includes both non-fiction and fiction stories and poems. She is Editor-in-Chief of the school’s student magazine, “The Spin.”

El Rinconcito, the little corner, is a special niche in Somos en escrito for short literary works: single poems, essays, short stories, flash fiction, young writers, and the like. Submit manuscripts to somossubmissions@gmail.com. ​