Latinx Poetry Month

♦ So ♦ Flo ♦ Po ♦ Jo ♦

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SoFloPoJo Contents: Essays * Interviews * Reviews * Special * Video * Visual Arts * Archives * Calendar * Masthead * SUBMIT * Tip Jar

Poetry from the SoFloPoJo  archives featuring:
Yael Valencia Aldana, Gustavo Adolfo Aybar, Arnaldo Batista, Richard Blanco, Oliver Brantome, Sandra M. Castillo, Adrian Castro, Adrian Ernesto Cepeda, Camila Cepero, Chanice Cruz,   Silvia Curbelo, Amelia Díaz Ettinger,   Josh Fernandez, Ariel Francisco, Anyély Gómez-Dickerson, LC Gutierrez,   Lola Haskins, Felipe Rodolfo Hendriksen, Jose Hernandez Diaz, Carolina Hospital, Holly Iglesias, Lúcia Leão, Mia Leonin, Mel Mancheno, Carlos F. Martin, Rita Maria Martinez,   Juan Pablo Mobili, Caridad Moro-Gronlier,   Jorge Teillier (translated by Holly Iglesias),   Sergio A. Ortiz,   Alexander Pérez,   Alexandra Lytton Regalado, Ricardo Rodriquez, Alfonso "Sito" Sasieta, Cecilia Savala, Esperanza Hope Snyder, Virgil Suárez, Angela Narciso Torres, Emma Trelles,   Ana Valdarrama Lemus, Julio César Villegas
_________________________________________
LATINX POETRY MONTH Reading:
Friday, Oct 11, 2024 at 7:30 PM ET
Please register in advance at the link below:
https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZ0udu6gpj8iHNTIEZFGPrX8ZFkSYhbDddw0

Yael Valencia Aldana

Issue #29 - May 2023

Eagle Ray

There is a boy naked slumped in a white
plastic patio chair, legs twisted around himself.
He was born wrong, his mother says, without
enough oxygen, his mother says, a part of him
missing, his mother says. He slumps on his back
porch facing the ocean. I am there too. His mother
hoses him off, his shower she says. Water drips from
his slight folded brown body. To me, she says, watch him
to me, his sister’s friend, his sister in parts unknown.
The mother leaves the slicked wet porch, edies swirling
on concrete. Why, I cannot remember. I cannot watch
the boy in this wretchedness, that his mother would
uncover his smooth unblemished skin fully before
a 12-year-old girl, his sister’s friend, his dignity flayed.
I watch the irregular tumbling surf, now cobalt blue,
now turquoise, now bleach white. Then, he comes,
his form wavering deep brown hugging sand in shallow
water, his darkened body undulates under his own
power, at his own speed. I look at the boy. Does
he see him too? This bay brown molted slip of a creature,
his skin’s darkness punctuated by uniquely white spangles,
the chestnut swooped tips of his wings breaking through
viscous thickness to touch air. The boy’s head remains
bowed, eyes turned away as the ray disappears
from our sight.

Yael Valencia Aldana is Afro-Latine poet and writer. She is the author of the poetry collection Black Mestiza (University Press of Kentucky, 2025) and the chapbook Alien(s) from (Bottlecap Press 2023). She is a Pushcart Prize winner, and her work has appeared in Torch Literary Arts, Chapter House Journal, and Slag Glass City, among others. She teaches creative writing at Florida International University, and she lives in Florida near the ocean with her son and too many pets. You can find her online at YaelAldana.com.

Gustavo Adolfo Aybar

Issue #28 - February 2023

A Reminder on How You Hold Your Sons, America

     1. Buzzing about Baseball

The year the Bay Area earthquake
hits and stops
game three
of the World Series,
thirty minutes
before the first pitch is hurled
over the mound,
I’m twelve. I live in LA.
The jolt occurs
months before my parent’s divorce,
and years
before my move to New York
where I’d watch footage
of the Rodney King riot.
Part of my childhood burned
and turned to ruins
baton strike,
after baton strike.

2. No Punch Backs

Today,
as we cross
the San Francisco
Bay Bridge,
my son plays
the license plate game
from the back seat, including
punches for out-of-state tags.
More fight-night, “Iron" Mike Tyson
than sparring partner. His tiny torso
moving rapidly
from side to side
punches landing heavy.
Precisely.
He’s eight.

I hold hands
with the woman I love
and will soon lose.
Her cackle floats
out of the windows
as we joke about the
sea lions on Pier 39,
their barks, her hisses
and recall the event
that led to their migration.
I don’t remember where I was
that Tuesday evening
in 1989. Maybe
with Jonathan or Rosendo
wrestling on the grass,
pretending to be Randy Savage
“Macho Man” or Hulk Hogan;
our childish misconduct                      and brutality
                              choreographed.
                                    Not televised.

  3. It All Happened In Seconds

I don’t remember news reports
of the Cypress bridge
and the way the freeway buckled
and twisted; its columns failing,
upper deck falling.
Vehicles dangling
at the edge.

Or how this same bridge we’re on now, crumpled, causing over forty deaths.

My son scans the road.
Fists clenched.
Our smirks and eyes meet.
I hold his gaze, my hands up
guarding my face
and the back of my head
from his quick rabbit punch.

I think of that mother
whose apartment building collapses
as she is about to change
her baby’s diaper.
The thought interrupts
my high-speed pursuit
and hunt for vehicles;
prevents me
from punching back.
Her family lived
in the Marina District.


4. In the Aftermath

The mother remained trapped under a beam,
keeping her infant son close. Surrounded

by parenting and true crime books
that ejected like spent bullet casings.

Her eyes watching as his body, a ground-
ball—burrows in her left hand, now a glove.

Her right hand trapping every seam of him. Her torso
a bullet-proof vest: armor and protection

against the lightbulbs or glass exploding
like shrapnel
and other crumbling, unstable things:
his breath,
his heart-
beat.

5. After the Devastation

The baby’s lungs couldn’t clear the debris and dust it inhaled; he chokes to death an hour after the quake. The parents leave California and have another child—now a teenage boy. Rodney King drowns. The Marina district sees a quick, dramatic rebirth. A hotbed where patrons gather to shop or drink and dine on clam chowder with sourdough bread; savoring spoonfuls of the warm and flaky meal. Most local stores in South Central LA will never reopen. My son’s scream helps me escape the shattered, burning buildings, the looting, the siren wails, and thoughts of dead sons.

    Florida!—fast, ear-
splitting, like a battle cry.
A coyote call;
first a bark then a deep howl
piercing the dark, moonlit night.

Gustavo Adolfo Aybar’s first poetry collection is We Seek Asylum. His chapbook, Between Line Breaks. He received fellowships from Cave Canem and Artist Inc. His poems, essays, and translations have appeared in SpanglishVoces, Space on Space Magazine, !Manteca!: An Anthology of Afro-Latin@ Poets, Primera Página: Poetry from the Latino Heartland, NINE: A Journal of Baseball History & Culture, Salem Press, ABC-CLIO, Asymptote, EZRA, InTranslation, and other journals and anthologies.

Arnaldo Batista

Issue #31 - November 2023

The Curse, or, the History of Men as Told through my Great-Grandmother’s Braid

My mother tells me the story of her mother’s mother, a mother she seldom saw, a native Guajajara daughter of a shaman who kept her meters-long white hair in a meters-long braid. Indeed, if my great-grandmother was Guajajarana, or Tocantins, or Guaraní, even descended from the devastated Murahã people, her history is lost to us. All but her braid, twisted over and under like the trunks of ash. My mother tells me she kept no brooms; instead, she spent nights brushing dust from her hair tips with a jade comb, singing, singing. Once, this mother, as a girl, beat the dust from her hair against a bed of rocks in the Lago das Pedras and through clouds of particulates and river mist, a Portuguese man saw her. He seized her, took her from the forests to the plains. He held her hostage in the flat valley between two mountains where the cisterns became her rivers, the gas street lights her new moon and stars. Over time, my grandmother’s braid thickened with cakes of dust, dragging heavy on the floor behind her. Over time, my grandmother bought a dense straw broom. At 100 years old, my widowed grandmother decided to cut her hair, the heavy grey braid snaking along the ground in a puff of white dust. After, she parted her bob with her jade comb while singing, singing songs of her Guajajara, or Guaraní, or Murahã grandmothers and soon after that

My grandmother died.
They buried her with her braid.
The dust settled—ash.

Arnaldo Batista is a queer poet from Miami, FL, where he received his MFA in Creative Writing from Florida International University. His work can be found in Prairie Schooner, Gulf Coast Journal, PANK, and has been nominated for 2024's Pushcart Prize and Best New Poets.

Richard Blanco

Issue # 17 - May 2020

A Rose as Question

  for John Bailly, in response to his gallery exhibition, The Roses of Fibonacci.
Richard Blanco reads in the video here:  https://vimeo.com/370238553

Cultivo una rosa blanca,
En julio como en enero,
Para el amigo sincero
Que me da su mano franca.
Y para el cruel que me arranca
El corazón con que vivo,
Cardo ni oruga cultivo:
Cultivo la rosa blanca.

I have a white rose to tend
In July as in January;
I give it to the true friend
Who offers his frank hand to me.
And for the cruel one whose blows
Break the heart by which I live,
Thistle nor thorn do I give:
For him, too, I have a white rose.

José Martí, Versos Sencillos: Simple Verses

A rose for the rose of your voice that greets and embraces me at your studio door as mon
frère. A rose for our brotherhood and the cafecito you brew for me, mi hermano. A rose
for the royal palms of my Havana’s  malecón that in our minds also sway along the
  Champs-Élysées of your Paris: one city, one country, one geography, one heart.

A rose for the velvet ripples of the waves that serenaded us into marrying Miami as natives.
A rose for the bay’s salty-perfume breezing through your window and inhaled by the
colors of  your paintings. A rose for your paintbrushes arranged like bouquets in rusty-
  can vases, for the sunlight abloom as we settle into wobbly lawn chairs, trying to steady
  ourselves in one another’s art of words in images, and images in words, as we’ve done
  for a lifetime.

A rose for the memories of our budding youth, seated at dinner parties or bar stools, our full-
bodied talk as tender as the tears of wine in our glasses, toasting not to the answers that
good art gives us, but to the questions that  great art asks us to ask. Now, our souls again
flower in the roses of each other’s eyes gazing at your imagination that’s exploded a rose
into petals of paint, strewed over your canvas, and spiraled back into a fresh rose to
rewind history, question all its crude beauty, its chance fate, its calculated chaos, its clear
blur.

A rose to ask the coil of serpents why they killed Laocoön’s sons that bore our fear of Greeks
bearing gifts. A rose to question Jesus’s crown of thorns and the reign of his sexless
apostles that still rule us with the divine sin of sex. A rose to rethink what was old about
the New World, and what was new about the Old World, the difference and sameness of
colonists and natives, conquerors and explorers, priests and murderers, slaves and
saints, soldiers and traitors. A rose to challenge who deserves roses laid at their tombs
or bronze statues praised in our parks.

A rose to ponder the ignorance of our two continents, not named by Columbus, not named
  Aztecia,  or  Tainoca, or  Mayaland, or Seminolia; but named “the Americans,” after the
   Florentine nickname of Amerigo Vespucci, like a father we never knew christened us. A
rose to question why a rose by any other name is—or is not—the same. A rose for the
songs of native tribes dancing with their ancestors’ ghosts, and ask them if their empires
would—or would not be—free of greed, war, genocide. A rose to doubt the lying lines of
maps with their tentacles of named streets, rivers, and borders, unlike the gnarled roots
of our mangroves that claim nothing but the worthless marsh of anonymous seawater.

A rose to admire anew the elusive beauty of the rose you redrew, rebloomed, recalculated
with the elegance of equations and proportion of sacred numbers. A rose for you, mon
frère. A rose for me, your hermano, as I step out of your studio, drenched by an impossible
rain of petals from a cloudless sky, and gladly I blossom suddenly, and again, and forever
into a gorgeous question.

Richard Blanco is an American poet, public speaker, author and civil engineer. He is the fifth poet to read at a United States presidential inauguration, having read for Barack Obama's second inauguration. He is the first immigrant, the first Latino, the first openly gay person and the youngest person to be the U.S. inaugural poet. Blanco’s first book of poetry, City of a Hundred Fires, was published in 1998 to critical acclaim, winning the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize from the University of Pittsburgh Press. Directions to the Beach of the Dead, published in 2005, won the PEN/Beyond Margins Award. In 2012, Blanco's third book of poetry, Looking for The Gulf Motel, was published; received the Paterson Poetry Prize, the 2012 Maine Literary Award for Poetry, and the Thom Gunn Award. To help heal the emotional wounds of the Boston Marathon bombings, he wrote “Boston Strong,” a poem he performed at the TD Boston Garden Benefit Concert and at a Boston Red Sox game at Fenway Park. In 2015, the Academy of American Poets chose Blanco to serve as its first Education Ambassador. He has been named a Woodrow Wilson Visiting Fellow and has received honorary doctorates from Macalester College, Colby College and the University of Rhode Island. He has been featured on CBS Sunday Morning, NPR’s All Things Considered and Fresh Air with Terry Gross, as well as major media from around the world, including CNN, Telemundo, AC360, BBC, Univision, and PBS. Blanco’s poems and essays have appeared in numerous publications and anthologies, including the Best American Poetry series, The New Yorker, The Nation, The New Republic, Huffington Post, and Condé Nast Traveler. He is co-creator of the blog Bridges to/from Cuba: Lifting the Emotional Embargo, which provides a cultural and artistic platform for sharing the real lives and complex emotional histories of thousands of Cubans across the globe.

Oliver Brantome

Issue #17 - May 2020

For a Friend Without Papers

You once told me about la Difunta Correa,
a saint in Argentina whose baby was found
still suckling on the everlasting breast milk
of his long-deceased mother.

In search of her sick husband, she hiked
miles with the baby at her side until her thirst
and hunger consumed her. Even in death,
her ever-full breast nourished the baby.
He lived for four days off his mother’s milk
alone, which they called a miracle.

A century and a half later, you were born
already tired of breathing, one lung hidden
behind the other. Your father trekked for miles
from Mendoza to San Juan to offer
la Difunta Correa flowers. He placed one
on each of her lungs and lay sobbing
at her side, while in a hospital far
from el campo, the saint nursed you to health
and called you a miracle.

Today la Difunta lays on a bed of flowers, a mattress
of prayers, bosom adorned with gold chalices, feet
blessed by campesinos, those distant cousins of ours.
Her effigy sleeps in Vallecito, her baby at her chest,
a doll made of porcelain and hope, her name
emblazoned – Saint of Travelers.

Years later, you too, travelled from Mendoza
to Miami in search of shelter. I tell you
our Saint of Travelers is a woman made of stone,
housed in New York. Our Mother of Exiles.
You tell me she can’t help you, her spirit’s
been dead for four long years, but still

you pray to the living Difunta Correa,
pray for another miracle to pour from the well
of her breasts, her lamp beside the golden door,
your lungs tired again, still struggling
to breathe free.

Oliver Brantome is a queer Latinx writer from Miami, FL. Their work has been previously published by Apogee Literary Journal and Into the Void Magazine. Oliver is studying English at Florida International University and has passions for anthropology, art history, philosophical anarchism, and possums. IG: @venom_versed

Sandra M. Castillo

Issue #3 - November 2016

En Route to a Poetry Reading

I drive over the Julia Tuttle Causeway to the tune of seagulls, a royal blue sky, my hand out the window, feeling the wind of October down Pennsylvania Avenue, South Beach, when an Argentinean woman in a rented vehicle she will abandon on the side of the road fails to stop, to yield, crashes into me, pushing me towards the center of the car, the door so dented, I am suddenly sitting on the passenger side, my arms extended, my elbow locked in place, the car spinning , as if waltzing, as if counting beats: one, two, three, one, two, three, twirling to The Blue Danube, leaving me face oncoming vehicles, unwitting partners in this dance, allowing more time for the poet scheduled to read with me as I wait for the police at a nearby apartment, whose tenants entertain me with an impromptu drag show: red high-heeled boots, alligator skin, flaxen blond wigs, gold lamé, fake eyelashes, shiny yellow, off the shoulder gypsy shirt, ruffles and feathers, the lady with the tutti-frutti hat, singing “Mamá, Mamá, yo quiero una chupeta,” synthetic pink leather, with matching bouffant, sequined platforms moving and shaking to the tune of I Will Survive.

SANDRA M. CASTILLO was born in Havana, Cuba. She received her M.A. from Florida State University. Her poems have appeared in The North American Review, The Connecticut Review, The Florida Review, Puerto del Sol, The Belleview Literary Review, The Cimarron Review, Clackamas Literary Review, as well as various anthologies including Paper Dance: 52 Latino Poets, A Century of Cuban-American Writers in Florida, Little Havana Blues, Touching the Fire: Fifteen Poets of Today’s Latino Renaissance, Cool Salsa: On Growing Up Latino in the U.S., American Diaspora: the poetry of displacement. She was awarded White Pine Press award for her collection entitled My Father Sings to My Embarrassment. Her new collection, Eating Moors and Christians, was published by CavanKerry.

Adrian Castro

Issue #14 - August 2019

Work Song: Re: What You Encounter in a Day’s Work

Dr. Williams is sitting in
my waiting room--
   Again the treatment rooms are
       full with the din
           of back-pain those
       who also gasp with asthma
   An elderly woman brings as payment a large papaya
           from her backyard
I cannot wait to ask
Dr. Williams--
Is this why your poems short and skinny
crowding two lifetimes into one
have the pulse of a spring river?

We are in the treatment room
His heart has two beats but he
       is happy
           about this
       I ask to see his tongue
I ask him if to know the breath whereby
understand the word
       I ask about his English father
       his Puerto Rican mother
       Hell’s Kitchen
       how language was often dissonant
I ask him if
   we can speak like
       América

Born in Miami from Caribbean heritage Adrian Castro is the author of Cantos to Blood & Honey (Coffee House Press), Wise Fish (Coffee House Press, 2005), Handling Destiny (Coffee House Press 2009) and has been published in several literary anthologies including Conjunctions, Paper Dance: 55 Latino Poets, and Little Havana Blues. He is the recipient of a USA Knight Foundation Fellowship, a Cintas Fellowship, State of Florida Individual Artist Fellowship, the NALAC Fund for the Arts Individual Fellowship, the Eric Mathieu King award from the Academy of American Poets.

Adrian Ernesto Cepeda

Issue #18 - August 2020

Thrift Store Mysteries

I can still hear her, mi Mami
porque, why would you want
to know someone else’s
clothes? Cochino, is what she
would tell me over and over
and of course being the grosero
treinta-something boy/man-child
that I was I had to go just to see
the blushing annoyance on her
roja, caramello cara. What mi
Mami never wanted to understand
were los cuentos, the stories, so

many untold inside the aisles of
Good Will. So many inanimate
voices, ready to speak to me.
What happened to the wilted
now faded off white vestido de
novia? Holding it up, I picture
aromas of a mal conceived
medianoche Vegas wedding--
a once beaming siren now
dimming in regrets, wanting
to forget the night, she would
replay in her mind, just like
el hombre who once sported

the azul prom tuxedo suit,
almost pristine with a hint
of Southern Comfort, stains
of a chaser, memories of Old
Style cerveza tell me this
chico never found his lucky
señorita, or else he would
have kept and treasured his
buena suerte threads, that

ooze smooth and cool like
a Fonzie leather chaqueta
de cuero, even Mami would
be impresionada with this
one. How many motorcycle
rides did this masterpiece
of fabric experience before
the wife made the owner
donate—just by the aroma
you could tell she didn’t want
all the lonely neighborhood
esposas y lobas divorciadas
sniffing around her once malo
bad boy, now tamed sinner,
his immortal threads like
superman domesticated
without his cape. All of these

cuentos on every rack, hanging
ready for further adventures--
reminding me when I would
arrive home, before logging into
AOL, ready to hear mi favorito
90s phrase, you’ve got mail.
I can hear mi Mami ordering
me to lávate sus manos sucias--
she not knowing in my closet I
scored a vintage blanco y negro
camisa, perfecto para Mardi
Gras. She never understood
the joy of giving new life to
a shirt like this, yearning
to experience new skin, placing
mi oreja to the fabric and feeling
the anticipación of so many
stories these colores, pockets,
and collars ready to behold.

Adrian Ernesto Cepeda is the author of Flashes & Verses… Becoming Attractions from Unsolicited Press, Between the Spine from Picture Show Press, Speaking con su Sombra with Alegría Publishing, La Belle Ajar & We Are the Ones Possessed from CLASH Books and his 6th poetry collection La Lengua Inside Me with FlowerSong Press won Honorable Mention in The Juan Felipe Herrera Best Book Award - One Author- Bilingual in The 2024 Int'l Latino Book Awards.
Adrian lives with his wife in Los Angeles with their adorably spoiled cat Woody Gold.

Camila Cepero

The Maureen Seaton Poetry Prize Issue

3 Pieces

Piece #1:

Everything was wet tar all the time.
It was sticky and elastic and black,
and descended upon the host’s life.

In early November, life was typical.
As a matter of trivia, this was ok.
By mid-November, everything was shrouded in a veil of despair.
This was not ok.

Fear gripped the host, and they began to reflect.
They settled into their comfortable couch, in their cozy home,
in the upscale neighborhood of their metropolitan city,
with a mug of hot coffee and no worries to speak of,
except the importance of themselves.

The following is a re-telling of everything that had gone wrong in those few weeks,
and all the reasons the host was allowed to be sad.

Oh well,
nevermind, nevermind.

Piece #2:

As part of my short time on earth,
and in the even shorter time frame which is the life I’ve lived,
I have met everyone I wanted to meet.
I have done everything I wanted to do.
I have seen every sight I wanted to see.
I have lived everything I wanted to live.

The petulant driver in the car behind me honks his horn.
The street light has turned green,
and my commute to the ugly grey building,
where I sit in an ugly grey office,
surrounded by ugly grey people,
carries on.

Piece #3:

I’m in a bookstore in Los Angeles that smells like it’s above my tax bracket,
in the middle of a day in the middle of a week,
and I’m on the phone with a friend, who has grown tired of my unemployment.

I ask the sales associate for the Wilde’s and the Kafka’s,
because I like Kafka.
And Wilde just seems like something I should have read by now.

Secretly, I’m in here searching for the meaning of life.

But I’m really not that dedicated, as the idea occurred to me in the last hour,
and I think I’ll just give up if I don’t find it in the next one.

The only thing I know is,
I’m definitely not reading Nietzsche.

Camila Cepero is a professional functioning adult impersonator. She was proudly born, raised, and will surely die in Miami, FL. She is the daughter of Cuban immigrants, a badge which she wears with the utmost honor at all times. She's entirely talentless, but nonetheless grew up attending prestigious art schools and studying visual arts, with most of her love being focused on photography. The jury is still out on whether she is legitimately a gifted writer - as she has been told time and again by everyone who does and doesn't matter - or if everyone else is just very bad at it. Here goes nothing.

Chanice Cruz

Issue #30 - August 2023

Kitchen Tiles

We dance, the kitchen tiles are cold under my bare feet, when
she wraps her hands around my waist, reminding me to take

a moment or two, when the water meant for the pasta don’t
need watching, when the sauce is on low, the stove buzzing

in warmth, waiting for her to come home, so we can dance
in the center of our kitchen, with nothing but the appliances

as an audience, to no music but what’s playing in our minds,
somehow it is always the same song; all these years we are

still a rhythm, dancing our ways through kitchens, the old
cast iron skillet is our devoted admirer, a constant through

arguments, apartment hunting, renovations, the first pan
I taught her to cook out of, to watch us dance from the

back burner, cool and quiet when she burned the green
oven mitt separating the ground turkey meat for tacos,

and we couldn’t stop laughing, oven mitts still make us giggle,
kitchen aisle filled with our amusement and nothing else matters,

after all these years it’s just us; just our hips swayin’, in
moment or two, we stole and made our own, my head rests

on her collarbone, her nose buried in my hair, our eyes closed,
a synchronized sigh escapes our lips, as the silent song is filled

with bubbles popping out of the pot, before we break, she
kisses me on the forehead, and I put the pasta in water.

Chanice Cruz is originally from Brooklyn, NY, however, credits Richmond, VA, for introducing her to slam poetry world. She is currently an Open Mic coordinator at Kew & Willow Books in Queens, NY and is a co-host for The Poet & The Reader Podcast. She received her bachelor’s degree in English at Queens College. Her poems have been published in Newtown Literary, Sinister Review, Periphery Journal and several other literary magazines.

Silvia Curbelo

Issue #2 - August 2016

Questions

Is it the way the light moves
that makes the fields catch fire?
Have you been here before?
Will the road end before
we reach the coast?

Do you hear music?
Is it the angel or the angle
that mesmerizes?
Do you know my best side?
Do the waves frighten you?

Do you dream in color,
in French, in rhyme?
Is it lay or lie, and are
the two mutually exclusive?
Do you believe in karma?

Is it the wildcard or carte
blanche that sustains you?
Is your shadow larger
than your stance?
And what about the rain,

so sentimental, a flaw
in the wind, concealing
the real sky? Have you heard
the one about the traveling
salesman and the pea?

How many milkmaids does it take
to screw in the proverbial
light bulb? How many raven-
haired princesses?
How many doves?

And if two trains should leave
Chicago at four in the afternoon
traveling in opposite directions,
is there really true north?
Will you still want me

before we reach the sea?

SILVIA CURBELO’S latest collection of poems, Falling Landscape, was published by Anhinga Press in 2015. She is the author of a previous full-length collection, The Secret History of Water (Anhinga Press), and two chapbooks. Awards include poetry fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Florida Division of Cultural Affairs, the Cintas Foundation and the Writer's Voice, as well as the Jessica Noble Maxwell Memorial Poetry Prize from American Poetry Review. Her poems have been published widely. A native of Cuba, Silvia lives in Tampa, Florida.

Amelia Díaz Ettinger

Issue #28 - February 2023

When I Was Five I Knew,

That lizards are born like miniature versions of the adults
Lizard’s eggs are soft and spongy
If you hold a lizard’s egg in your hand,

the miniature adult will burst out from the warmth

Some lizards have blue eyes, some don’t

just like children

Some people are repulsed by lizards
and if you love lizards too much, they are repulsed by you

and call you names behind your father’s back

When I Was Five I Didn’t Know

the words ‘out of wedlock’

or ‘abduction’

that mothers are there to shield you

from words like ‘out of wedlock’ and ‘abduction’

that sticks and stones are hard,

but words are irreversible

that loving a lizard was not repulsive,

but being part Indian was

Amelia Díaz Ettinger is a Mexican-Puerto Rican poet and writer. Her books include Learning to Love a Western Sky, Speaking at a Time /Hablando a la Vez, These Hollow Bones, and two
chapbooks Fossils in a Red Flag and Self Dissection. Amelia’s poetry and short stories have been published in anthologies, literary magazines, and periodicals. She currently resides in Eastern Oregon.

Josh Fernandez

Issue #4 - February 2017

Oh God, Are We Perfect? Please Say No

I remember when I was a woman.
It was like yesterday
because it was yesterday.
I crouched in a corner
to watch men pass
that strut they had
that puffed chest illusion doubling
their size
little hearts shriveling like slugs left
in the sun.

I was born in a park that went on
forever. Pops said the swath
of grass was a runway
that if you go fast enough
you take flight
and land in a foreign
place of your choosing.
I chose the island
where nobody spoke
English and men wore dresses
and painted their lips
black as cobras
and I never saw Pops again.

Since we’re being honest
I don’t remember when
I was a man
or at least the kind
you see in movies
who rip their shirts and grab the necks
of other men like spiders
latching onto other spiders
and you can’t tell
if they’re making love
or poisoning the life
out of each other.

I remember when I was something else
neither man nor woman
gay nor straight.
I remember because it’s now
sitting on the edge
half on the concrete
and the other half on the wet
grass and I’m getting the sense
there’s another half somewhere
maybe thousands of them
that math as we know it is wrong
that we have always been more
than whole
a series of fucked up halves
a perfect infinity
yet the world keeps
dividing us otherwise.

JOSH FERNANDEZ’S arts and culture articles have appeared in Spin Magazine, The Sacramento Bee, The Sacramento News & Review and several other publications. His poems, essays and short stories have been published in journals big and small. Fernandez currently teaches English at Folsom Lake College and writes for the music satire site, The Hard Times. He is from Sacramento, CA., and heard about SoFloPoJo from Facebook.

Ariel Francisco

Issue #28 - February 2023

Brief Scene from a Movie I Walked Out On at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival

A jangled station wagon with a giant
bloody cross strapped to the hood
takes a too-sharp turn on the cliff-
side highway it’s racing down and
Jesus slides right off and kites through
the air for a few moments in a perfect
swan dive before smashing into pieces
against the sea as someone up above
yells something frantically in Italian.

Ariel Francisco is the author of Under Capitalism If Your Head Aches They Just Yank Off Your Head (Flowersong Press, 2022). A poet and translator born in the Bronx to Dominican and Guatemalan parents and raised in Miami, his work has been published in The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day, The New York City Ballet, Latino Book Review, and elsewhere. He is Assistant Professor of Poetry and Hispanic Studies at Louisiana State University.

Anyély Gómez-Dickerson

Issue #30 - August 2023

When Is a Window Not a Window

you may think a window is just a window, and I assure you
it is not, even if you insist on defining it in architecture terms,
as an aperture that lets in light, or a portal to look through

a window in Miami is not just a window, it’s a ventanita
that hangs off restaurants and bakeries, this window breathes
its cultural oxygen into our lungs and ansiosos, we inhale

porque that ventanita sells more than pastelitos, cigars y café,
our ventanita solidifies our identity, fills us with a longing
unique to our starved and homesick pueblo in a city where

sorrow dies among the palm trees that sway and silhouette
an apricot sky, a city erected on diasporic mortar and dreams
of antiquity to lessen the pain of loss, yet still disconnected

in a city of hondureños, cubanos, puertorriqueños, colombianos,
haitianos y dominicanos, brasileños, panameño, venezolanos and
so many latinos and caribeños, each gathered at the city’s ventanitas

each yearning to forget and remember, and savor the well-seasoned,
the simmered or stewed, the sweet and the salty and the freshly-baked,
and feed on melancholy and sips of yesterday, for a taste of home

Anyély Gómez-Dickerson was born in Cuba and grew up in Miami, FL. She earned her poetry degree from Florida International University and her BS from Temple University. For her, being a Latina writer means creating art with “teeth” to expose issues plaguing our communities to foster change. Her projects highlight her life in Miami and explore her black, European, and Taína history back to Cuba’s slavery period under Spain. Her poetry also appears in The Latino Book Review, Acentos Review, West Trestle Review, Ocotillo Review, La Libreta Poetry Journal, and Label Me Latina/o Journal.

LC Gutierrez

Issue #26 - August 2022

Signs

How could we not count this as center?
Summer gathering our kin, in
from Colorado or California:
that small diaspora of escapees who,
like my mother, snapped right back
into that gentle Acadiana creole,
the rounded flower of the vowels.
Gone the gutturals and the raspy nasals,
sloughed off centuries from Continental French.
Zoned in a hand-carved rocker
her face taking the same soft contours
as her sisters’; the same patient spaces
between their speech beseeching the old
cuckoo clock to slow-peck out the seconds,
punctuating the endless presence of that ‘there.’
Pecking away the bridge between her Rolex
and their Timex. Synched for the day.

No signs designed for us. We learned
the muddy ripples in the gully meant something
live, but only after our five uncles
barrel-chested and beer-bellied, thick
forearms dripping, hoisted a turtle like a trophy,
plucked from its nest. How were we to know,
the hooting Cajun trills were celebrating
soon-to-be soup? Until it steamed in bowls before us,
magical as their muscles, wartime tattoos
of battleships and bare-bellied hula girls.
Sawed off truck drivers, carpenters, roughnecks.
How were we to trace that heritage of brylcreemed
Elvis hair and thick sideburns to our plaid
Bermuda shorts and leather loafers?
My brothers and I, wide-eyed in the country.

No signs but for the patent present ones. Posting
miles to Opelousas. Lafayette. Carencro,
Rayne and Sunset. Rusted RC Cola tin
on the side of a general store. Mississippi
river bridge from Baton Rouge, “to grandmother’s
we’d go.” A riverboat-ride distance, passing
Cancer Alley and ghost plantations splintered
with the slave shacks we hadn’t yet learnt about.

Were we to know that boiling plentitude
of tables spread red with crawfish,
in the shielding shade of oaks, the gris-gris
of the line hung with drying red peppers,
against the garlic-gray cypress porch,
barbecue fire, accordion chords of summer,
and perfect pralines spun from grandma’s gnarled fingers,
our seeming eternal return, wasn’t a promise?
Too young to taste the stove-top coffee,
filtered through a stocking, precious in a demitasse,
it still seeped into our psyches, a house of scents
and senses. We were wholly steeped in that
presence. Did we not know this as love?

Whence did we wade into the slow grief of decades?
As hapless and blind as those hogs that came to slaughter,
feasted on potato peels, corn cobs and all the waste
of our want that slushed in slop buckets.
The call now virtual and the response hollow:
punch in the name of the place in Google
and land a different town across the state.
Or finally find it on the map and the name lies
like the gray bones of nothing across a line of state highway.
A mocking photo appears of the roadway shoulder:
a place you might stop to piss unobserved.

Search the names of the divorced. Correlate
birth and death dates and the survivors
mentioned in the funeral home obituaries,
framed by a twilight bayou background.
An uncle who once carved you toothpicks;
his son a diabetic, alcoholic amputee.
A cousin on a list of sex offenders:
we would sit with him on the train tracks,
we were five smiling boys
our legs dangling over the muddy gully,
our sweaty, bare arms rubbed against his.
And we would choose to stay like that forever,
hurling ragged rocks at the signs.

LC Gutierrez is a product of many places in the Southern USA and the Caribbean. An erstwhile academic, he now writes, teaches and plays trombone in Madrid, Spain. His work is published in a number of wonder journals, and forthcoming in Notre Dame Review, Sugar House Review, Trampoline Journal, New York Quarterly and Delta Poetry Review. He is a poetry reader for West Trade Review.

Lola Haskins

Issue #2 - August 2016

Solomon, the Two Women, and the Baby

On the way home from school I tell my girls
about Solomon, the two women, and the baby.
From their car seats in the back, they ask to hear
it again, so I start over. Again, they say.
By the third telling, one woman’s raising sheep,
the other horses. By the fifth, the baby’s name
is Aidan, little fire. The sixth adds husbands--
John the Blonde and Sean the Water Carrier--
and the seventh that one family lives on a farm
in the mountains, the other near a river. But
I finish every telling the same: that when
Solomon offers to settle the case by cutting
the baby in two, one of the women screams
Don’t touch my child! and hands him to
the other, which, I explain, is how Solomon
found out whose baby this was, because,
being wise, he knew that no true mother
would ever let anyone hurt her child.
And I think my little ones wanted the story
over and over to make sure I wouldn’t
change the end, no matter how many times
the words came from my mouth. Yes,
I think that was what they waited to hear.

Issue #11 - November 2018

Redemption

When the sky turns blue I'm drawn to look beyond it but every time
I try, the fog rolls in off the Golden Gate again. And my first love
jumps again and is scattered on the gray waves again like the
flowers people throw from boats. And I walk the fire road again to
where the dark pines open to hills smeared with red. And I take the
turn up at the fork as I always have, because I know the other way
leads to where I don't belong.

When the fog rolls away, everything that used to be there is gone.
No house on Vallejo Street, no back door whose chain rattled every
night at three after the caller I never saw had hung up. No police
dog, baring his teeth in the yard. But the story isn't over because
what's left is no protection against last year's man who said he
loved me then night after night idled his car in my driveway in the
dark then knocked my mailbox off its post- it fell like a punched
child—and finally broke into my garage and took what he'd wanted
all along-- not my bicycle but boxes and boxes of my self. I can
still see my faces on the backs of those books, burning. He must
have enjoyed watching each tiny image, each witch, curl and turn to
ash. He must have warmed his hands over the fire.

The sky is blue again and far above the woods an eagle crosses.

Issue #27 - November 2022
The Coup

I offered them my chest
and told them, go ahead.
But even González,
who hated me the most,

could not. How sweetly
habit grows, like mold
on shoes in our hot country.
I told them their own troops,

a prickle of boys, brown hands
slippery on their guns,
were loyal to me and
now I tell them sing,

mouths full of dirt or no.
And even the ones whose
throats I slit, sing.

- Panamá

LOLA HASKINS’ latest collection Homelight (Charlotte Lit Press 2023)—which includes “The Coup”--was named Poetry Book of the Year by Southern Literary Review. The one before that, Asylum (University of Pittsburgh, 2019), was featured in the NYT Magazine in 2020 and also in this summer's edition of The John Clare Journal. Past honors include the Iowa Poetry Prize, two NEAs, two Florida Book Awards, narrative poetry prizes from Southern Poetry Review and New England Poetry Review, a Florida's Eden prize for environmental writing, and the Emily Dickinson prize from Poetry Society of America.

Felipe Rodolfo Hendriksen

Issue #30 - August 2023

Away Down South in Dixie

I’m trying to do my groceries,
Just to forget how miserable I am,
And a bright light blinds me:
A gloved hand, maybe leather,
commanding me to stay put.
Like a good immigrant.
Like a good American, too.
Just stop. Stay there.
Don’t move. Don’t think. Don’t even look.

But I do think, I guess. About my mom,
And what she used to tell me
When we had the money to go to Disney:
Do whatever the police officers tell you, sweetie.
They’re here to protect us, honey. Do as they say.

So I do.

I’m gonna get my wallet, sir.
Left pocket; really slow.
I know how it is; I know it’s hard for you.
I’ve seen the videos where your people get shot.
I promise I’m more scared than you are,
And I can assure you that I love America,
I really adore your country, sir, officer.
I even call it America,
Like you want to,
Because you want to be your own continent
And I respect that.

It may even surprise you,
Coming from a guy like me,
But I can name every president, sir,
Even the ones you have forgotten or never cared to learn at all.
Ain’t that something, eh?
I also like Gran Torino, officer,
You know, the movie with all the cars and the guns,
And the straight, white male violence;
Maybe you look up to it too.

And I don’t think Vietnam was a mistake or Saddam a saint.
I even like the CIA, I promise you, sir.
I don’t want any trouble,
You already saw my visa.
I don’t mean to offend, officer,
But I think I know my rights
Or something.
My grandpa was comisario
Back in Argentina. In Quilmes, that’s where I’m from.
That has to mean something, right?
I promise I won’t go out anymore, I swear.
I’ll just stay in my room and don’t bother you anymore.
I’ll just leave the sidewalk for Americans,
From now on.
Are we cool, sir?

Cool? Great. Phew.
Okay, officer, thank you.
If you don’t mind now, sir,
Only if that’s okay with you,
I better get back home.

Felipe Rodolfo Hendriksen holds a Professor Diploma in Humanities from Pontificia Universidad Católica Argentina. He is twenty-six and has been writing —with some ups and downs— since he was a child. In his creative writing, he humbly follows the steps of Jorge Luis Borges, Roberto Bolaño, and Haruki Murakami.

Jose Hernandez Diaz

Issue #26 - August 2022

Portrait of the Artist as a Brown Man

A few years ago, I was in the same library,
In the same quiet, upper-middle-class town

I didn’t live in. I’d just finished writing
A prose poem that would eventually

Get published in The Nation. Writer’s high.
Then, a white lady came up to me

And asked about the trash. I was confused,
Until I realized she thought

I was a janitor.

Issue #34 - August 2024

Ode to the Surreal Prose Poem

You refuse to conform, don’t you? Why can’t you just be normal? Just kidding. You’re
perfect the way you are. Michael Jordan is Poetry, but you are Dennis Rodman. Take us
to the dream world. The subconscious. Another dimension. Space. Another time-period.
Magic. Dragons. Centaurs. I want to read you to escape. To laugh. To cry. All of it. One
day you will be mainstream. One day tomorrow will be the past. All is possible. All is
welcome. Take me away.

Jose Hernandez Diaz is a 2017 NEA Poetry Fellow. He is the author of The Fire Eater (Texas Review Press, 2020) Bad Mexican, Bad American (Acre Books, 2024) The Parachutist (Sundress Publications, 2025) and Portrait of the Artist as a Brown Man (Red Hen Press, 2025). He has been published in The American Poetry Review, The Yale Review, The London Magazine, Poetry Wales, The Iowa Review, Huizache, Colorado Review, The Missouri Review, The Nation, Poetry, The Progressive, Poets.org, The Southern Review, and in The Best American Nonrequired Reading. He has taught creative writing at the University of California at Riverside and online for Hugo House, Lighthouse Writers Workshops, and The Writer's Center. He has been the Poet in Residence at the Carolyn Moore Writers House with Portland Community College. Currently, he is the Visiting Writer in Residence at the University of Tennessee.

Carolina Hospital

Issue #23 - November 2021

Mourning for School Girls in Cerulean Headscarves

A car bomb and two other blasts detonate near the school gates,
the first so powerful, and so close, some children cannot be found.

I cannot write about the pelicans on shore flying in V-formation,
nor the buried sunflowers and sea oats on the protected sand dunes,
not today. They disguise fighter jets, land mines, and trenches.

The afternoon shift of high school girls is the target, 85 dead,
another 147 maimed or wounded by shrapnel tearing their bodies.

I cannot write about daughters and granddaughters, safely sheltered,
ringed by myths, fables, and princess coloring books, like the one
strewn on the dusty street next to torn notebooks and bloodied sneakers.

On the arid hilltop near Kabul, hundreds gather to mourn their daughters.
By the dirt graves, they defiantly scribe large white letters: EDUCATION.

I cannot write about college girls in my classes who outnumber the boys
nor about the emails from former students in graduate school. Not today.
Today I can only sob for this loss so distant, of youth, of hope, of God.

Carolina Hospital’s poetry collections include Key West Nights and Other Aftershocks (Anhinga Press) and The Child of Exile: A Poetry Memoir (Arte Público Press), as well as Myth America and How to Get into Trouble (Anhinga Press), both collaborative collections with Maureen Seaton, Holly Iglesias, and Nicole Hospital-Medina; plus, the novel A Little Love, under the pen name C. C. Medina (Warner Books). She also collaborated with South Florida writers on the New York Times bestselling novel Naked Came the Manatee. Her new poetry collection All Roads Lead to Here is forthcoming in August 2025 (Redacted Books, ELJ Editions).

Holly Iglesias

Issue #14 - August 2019

God Loves the Stranger

far from home and no way back, loves the yearning heart, the fevered memory and appetite for the past. The stranger walks at a remove, the habits of distance evident from his hat's tilted brim to the wary gait that moves him from one side of the street to the other. He ducks into a luncheonette, takes a stool, and from this perch created a dwelling the size of a placemat--spoon, plate, mug newspaper folded around the puzzle--this daily shelter temporary, lasting only as long as a lunch is capable of lasting, the food salty, brown, alien.

Issue #19 - November 2020

Set Store By Your Trifles

I ransack the crannies of my childhood—cupboards, linen closets,
desk drawers, toolboxes, duffel bags, medicine chests, lockers,
pantries—to gather whatnots and doodads for comfort in some
unforeseen future. Many moves have winnowed the loot, each
abandoned house now recalled simply by what was left at the curb
or flung into the sea—warped rackets, wedding rings, baby teeth.
What little remains fits in a box, a candy box my father gave my
mother as consolation for their nights apart, the box that, once
emptied, she stashed in her lingerie drawer, inside it the hankies
her aunts had embroidered, holy cards of Saint Theresa and Saint
Anthony, and her half of a heart-shaped pendant worn on a thin
chain until he came home from the war.

Holly Iglesias’ work includes three books of poetry— Sleeping Things, Angles of Approach, and Souvenirs of a Shrunken World—a critical work, Boxing Inside the Box: Women’s Prose Poetry, and two collaborative chapbooks, Myth America and How to Get Into Trouble. She has been awarded fellowships by the National Endowment for the Arts, the North Carolina Arts Council, the Edward Albee Foundation, and the Massachusetts Cultural Council. Her current project is Theories of Flight, an intergenerational memoir in prose fragments.
Scroll down for Holly's translation of Jorge Teillier's Para Habla Con Los Muertos

Lúcia Leão

Issue #1 - May 2016

Suggestion

for a boyfriend,
a recovering alcoholic:
I would spread a cold
sweet almond-flavor liqueur
on the parts of the body available
to his mouth and hands,
with a generous amount left
for the parts that only intimately
we share.
without him suspecting it.
the taste would not awaken his addiction.
it would be a guerrilla-like act of passion instead.
this is not meant to keep anybody a prisoner,
but to burst a certain repression of the senses.
there is no meaning to love, when it is done.
this is something else,
as if with the same language
we would speak another one

Issue #6 - August 2017

Because I Was Thirsty When I Met You

I saw only water.
It wasn't a shipwreck or a drowning,
but I missed your island.

And today, when it becomes so difficult to talk
about geography, when it is not easy to speak
about our bodies, hourglasses dripping sand,
I can't sit down and watch.

I didn't see you were an island.

My thirst a congregation of now scattered molecules -
a raven, a rave, what is and is not
solid in me,
a haven, a rugged, ragged shore - you.

Issue #11 - November 2018

a kind of marriage

for Oswaldo Martins

the erotic poems were sent to ashes
when he died, but his wife grabbed a few

lower-case beginnings of lines becoming
dust in her eyes, but she didn’t cry

in fictional women he praised her,
and she was happy for him, for that

island of so many lakes, the imagination
she wore with him, his body

LÚCIA LEÃO is a writer, translator, and interpreter originally from Rio de Janeiro. Her poems have been published in SWWIM Every Day, SoFloPoJo, Ekphrastic Review among others. Leao has published a collection of short stories and is co-author of a young-adult novel, both published in Portuguese, in Brazil. She has a master’s degree in Brazilian Literature from UERJ (Rio de Janeiro) and a master’s in print journalism from University of Miami. Her first poetry collection will be published in Brazil in October 2024.

Mia Leonin

The Maureen Seaton Poetry Prize Issue

Self Made

One day I will un-drop the slipper and un-princess
the entrails of happily ever after.

One day, I will castle past mote and huntsman.
I will, in fact, unapple the queen’s hand.

Even the storm her mirror conjures will no longer scare me.
One day, I will land in the witch’s lap, my barometric vulva

pulsating its own weather, whirling past Oz to an emerald present.
One day, I will mount a lusty roan and ride,

my ascending aorta sheathed in high noon and gun smoke.
But the sundown standoff will be with joy.

I will put down my weapons and cajole the idea of her with whiskey. No,
I will unlace my corset, hitch a gartered leg over the pianist’s shoulder and serenade her. No,

I will hop on a stallion as unbroken as a thunderbolt and flee her. No,
I will shoot joy, and with my one-eyed aim, I never miss.

Mia Leonin is the author of four poetry collections: Fable of the Pack-Saddle Child (BkMk Press), Braid, Unraveling the Bed, and Chance Born (Anhinga Press), and a memoir, Havana and Other Missing Fathers (University of Arizona Press). Leonin has published poetry and creative nonfiction in New Letters, Prairie Schooner, Guernica, Indiana Review, Witness, North American Review, and others. She teaches creative writing at the University of Miami in Coral Gables, Florida.

Mel Mancheno

Issue #30 - August 2023

Hanging in your bedroom were three posters by Egon Schiele. And though you were still a woman back then he reminded me of you.

On those in-between nights. When the sun hasn't quite blushed its cheek at you. And the moon has been bold and traced its body on the sky.
When you've brushed, dry bird-bone brittle
but beautiful, pulsating red hair out.
And drank your last glass of water for the night.
with a healthy serving of biotin.
Is the last thing, the only thing
you have to reach for
a knife?
Not a sheet, but a knife?

It's a sad song you sing
Before you go to sleep.
About laying a willing hand around your quartz-dust skin. Warming up balled fists,
& Opening up those cosmic palms,
Letting doves fly out and into each other's stomachs
Kissing on each star making up that galaxy in your belly.
And out comes a beautiful boy, or girl, or whatever they want to be.
Whatever portrait it’ll paint, that’ll be more than fine, it’ll be great.
But when you’re alone. Clinging onto the self that’ll let you survive.
What is this feeling for?

When you wake up just a tad too late, in a half-mistaken, exceptional mood. Rushing to pull
the denim around your hips, up your thighs.
Admiring the curves to your comet.
When you're halfway through/out the door
catching glimpses of yourself in a mirror of rainwater collected by the subway station,
do you remember who you used to be?
A pre-loved you, before you had taken each and every rusty, and unlovable brick out of you, to replace it with a new.
Before you cut-out, killed parts of yourself, in the name of liberation. And the forming of a pearl.
Inside it do you see
An eighth of the size of the tip of a sewing needle
worth of you?
Before you understood
The man you needed
Was right within you.
Before you had realized
misery didn't love company, it just hated being alone.
Before you know you’re
exactly where you're supposed to be.

Mel Mancheno is a writer, activist, and researcher concerned with how humans make sense of their identities with their life experience.

Carlos F. Martin

Issue #33 - May 2024

Along Flagler and in la Saguesera, Santeros Sing to Orishas
After Ariel Francisco

I heard them and can still hear them
above the hissing heat pulsating from the asphalt
above the screech of plastic EVs crashing in intersections
above the wail of the goats before sacrifice
above the Cubanos protesting outside of Versailles
above the crackle of right-wing Spanish radio
above the ballot harvesters threatening the elderly─
a vote for the Dems is a vote for Castro and Chavez,
above Jehovah’s witnesses knocking on our Sunday morning door
above the gurgle of shit seeping from pipes in Biscayne Bay
above the salsa blaring from a parking lot quinceañera practice
above parents accosting middle school umpires
above the yelps of children hurtling down the Tropical Park Hill
above the desperate silent drowning of a girl in her pool
above the guilty sobs of her drunken inattentive relatives
along Flagler and in la Saguesera, Santeros sing to Orishas
and I hear them West into the river of grass
as the mosquitos begin their lustful hunt
and the night awakens lighting the stars
sinking below the alligators and gar,
sinking below the black bass and cichlids
into the muddy bones of the Value Jet dead

Carlos F. Martin is a current applicant for the FIU MFA in Creative Writing program, having recently worked as a reader on FIU's Gulf Stream Magazine. He is a practicing lawyer residing in Miami, Florida with his wife and two daughters.

Rita Maria Martinez

Issue #6 - August 2017

Bionic Arm
for Joanna

The cheerleading pyramid crumbles
during finals and my twelve-year-old niece falls

from the top tier like a false oracle
expelled from Delphi. Snapped

in half, her arm looks like a boomerang.
At the hospital they set the protrusion

and insert metal bolts. Soon she’ll forget the tears
and blinding pain, but for now strange pangs

at odd moments remind she is not quite human.
She will raise her arm in Spanish class,

her Sophia Loren tan glowing as she conjugates
pain: Yo duelo, tu dueles, el duele.

She will elbow a pubescent jerk in the groin.
Every so often she’ll recall the descent from greatness,

the elusive apex of perfection growing
fainter as her arm wakes metal detectors,

their shrill roar reminding her to think
twice before offering her hand to another.

Rita Maria Martinez’s current poetry raises awareness about triumphs and challenges when navigating life with chronic daily headache (CDH) and migraine. Her Jane Eyre-inspired poetry collection--The Jane and Bertha in Me (Kelsay Books)—was a finalist for the Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize. Rita's poetry appears in publications like The Best American Poetry Blog, Ploughshares, Pleiades, and Tupelo Quarterly. Her work has also been featured as part of CLMP's 2023 Disability Pride Month reading list. Follow Rita on Instagram at rita.maria.martinez.poet or visit https://comeonhome.org/ritamartinez.

Juan Pablo Mobili

Issue #27 - November 2022

To understand your father's sky,

don’t look upward but bring
your gaze down to the soil
that was disturbed,
the small hill rising over
what my father buried
and covered hastily
because dictatorships
are not ideal times
for gardening, and the books
to which he gave their sepulture
had to be hurried from my shelves,
driven in a taxi to the garden
at his father’s house
where he dug the cold earth
with an old shovel that resisted
and then conceded to be a grave
for the texts of revolutionaries,
only months after I left my country,
his company, and the garden
where once my brother and I played,
and only the magnolia roots
lived under the ground.

Issue #32 - February 2024

After midnight in our kitchen

was a busy scene,
my father up, and dunking

what was left of a stale baguette
in a glass of cold milk.

I was coming home from discussing
the responsibilities of poetry

in a troubled country like ours,
and my mother would join us, half asleep,

lighting up a cigarette worried
about my brother’s whereabouts.

While other families slept, mine talked,
loudly, about our wishes, coins

we cast down a deep well
hoping we heard a distant splash.

Juan Pablo Mobili was born in Buenos Aires, and adopted by New York. His poems appeared in The American Journal of Poetry, Hanging Loose Press, and The Paterson Literary Review, among others including SoFloPoJo, as in many publications in Europe, Asia, Latin America, and Australia. He’s a recipient of several Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominations, and his chapbook, Contraband, was published in 2022. He's also a Guest Editor for The Banyan Review.

Caridad Moro-Gronlier

Issue #3 - November 2016
Topography

After Ana Mendieta, Untitled, Siluetas, 1980

You have come to make sense
of this land, to lie within a canyon
of want and stake a spot of stone
with the weight of your bones.

You have come to plant
your body in this cracked earth,
parched streambed that survives
on the memory of water.

You have come as if this place
could sustain you, retain the whole
of you, the stamp and edge of you,
but Iowa will never be home.

You have come to leave
your impression in the ground,
a reminder of all that remains after
the stripping away of root and seed and soil--

cavern, chronicle, chasm.

Issue #28 - February 2023

Memory As Chrysalis, As Butterfly
After Portfolio, a painting series by Sofia Fotiadou

Your memory is still more skin than armor

not quite shell or breastplate,
still part kiss, part sapphire, part Paris,
metamorphosis takes time.

What’s meant to fly will break

through a mille-feuille of years
no matter how tight the weave
on the skein of its silken cocoon.

The butterfly will emerge remade

tissue and limb distilled
down to cells that exist only to rebuild
themselves into wings.

CARIDAD MORO-GRONLIER In April 2024, Caridad Moro-Gronlier was appointed the second Poet Laureate in County history by Miami-Dade Mayor Daniella Levine Cava. She is the author of Tortillera, the winner of the TRP Southern Poetry Breakthrough Prize published by Texas Review Press (2021) and Visionware (Finishing Line Press, 2009) and she is also the editor of Grabbed: Poets and Writers Respond to Sexual Assault, Empowerment and Healing (Beacon Press, 2020). Caridad serves as the Associate Editor for SWWIM Every Day, an online daily poetry journal for women identifying poets, and as The Betsy Writer’s Room Poetry-Curator-At- Large. She lives with her wife and son in Westchester, FL.

Sergio A. Ortiz

Issue #21 - May 2021

The Noise

You understood the docks, places
where salt is a blind lady seated on my lap,
where small teeth gnaw quicksands
of what's been forgotten,
where old anchors and barges
oxidized by seagull droppings,
corrosive tumult of peace and despair,
intertwine in the old fashioned way of the ocean,
seascape that surrounded
us without knowing how far
from our imagination
our most intimate arguments travel.
There's a sky full of vessels, visible in my tears,
where your gaze runs out of breath
trying to reach me.
A worn-out eternity fondled by the dead
softened by complaints of the sick.
The afternoon sinks like a ship
belonging to everyone.
You've seen delirious mates,
wind-music blown through their yardarms,
felt the gale halt between the folds of my sails,

discovered oblivion on my nape.
Allow your desire to rest.
I'll set the clouds on fire,
lacerate the sun with my straight razor
part company with time. I'm saving my abysses,
to scamper away from the cold,
my ridiculous collection of antiquated scores.
Bebopping waves make us forget,
young and old double-dutching
love's sacred fire on the bed.

Issue #33 - May 2024

True Lies, a Cento

All joy carries with it an invention.
All pain, songs in which a self dies.

The rivers, the rivers are overflowing.
Shipwrecks, we die inward.

Between the real and the desired
the celestial land of the imagined

Don't abandon me, hiss and silence.
Don't throw nonsense at me between the door cracks.

The hunt is on, and sprung the trap
flayed by thrones I treck the rocks.

There is this white wall, above which the sky creates itself.
A gray wall now, clawed and bloody

In the last angel's hand unwelcome and warning,
the sands have run out against us.

Used to be I hung on your every word.
Sing! you’d say: and I was a bird.

All dreams of the soul
end in a beautiful man’s or woman’s body.

I too enjoy soft palms on me,
enjoy when he rests on my body with a hard breath.

To receive all things
wrenches my stomach and I vomit to calm wanting.

*Gabriel Celaya, "La Mentira de Verdad"

*Mario Vargas Llosa, "La Señorita de Tacna.”
*Pablo Neruda, "Sólo la Muerte"

*Gabriel Celaya, "A, con de, por, para Amparitxu"

*Gabriel Francisco Ruiz Rivera, "Refufuñeta"

*Sylvia Plath, "Pursuit"

*Sylvia Plath, "Apprehensions"

*Audre Lorde, "Movement Song"

*Ross Gay, "Love, I'm Done With You"

*Yeats, "The Phases of the Moon"

*Elizabeth Acevedo, "Iron"

*Miguel Alegaron, "HIV (1994)"

Sergio A. Ortiz is a retired Educator, Bilingual-Gay Puerto Rican Poet, Human Rights Advocate. Pushcart nominee, Best of the Web, Best of the Net. Sergio last appeared in SoFloPoJo in of May 2021

Alexander Pérez

Issue #27 - November 2022

dress-up

maybe lipstick will help.
acid green, electric blue,
jazzberry jam. not like
my mother in her coffin.
here i am, spanish,
with a big nose,
short, thinning black
kinky hair. i always leave
candy apple red smears
on my teeth. i like the taste
of wax lips. she did not like
her husband’s foul-mouthed
kisses. he called her fat and dumb.
me i was a sissy boy. there were
no fags in his louis l’amour.
who chose pale dogwood
for my mother’s thin lips?
i never caught her in lipstick.
she never caught me.
i crawled up on the bathroom
sink applied carefully with markers
cotton candy, flamingo, grapefruit,
rosy, sweet, vibrant pink.
smacked my lips. then scrubbed.
my mother laid out in
an open coffin. lips prim,
mocking me, mocking her.
the stiff body did not fill
the untailored funeral gown.
a victorian doll on display.
i am trying new colors:
midnight purple, earthy red.
the woman she loved,
the woman she was
refused to be seen.
so i ask why an open casket?
her eyes sunk back in her head.
see my father looking down on her,
leaning in for a kiss?
if i were there, i would have turned away.
but i did not go. would not go.
now what would i choose?
charcoal black.

Alexander Pérez descends from early-twentieth century Spanish immigrants who first traveled to Cuba, then the United States, to eventually settle in upstate New York to find work in construction as day laborers. He's the first in his family to receive a college education and credits his family's hard work and sacrifices for his ability to study literature. Alexander first began writing poetry at age forty-eight to help cope with several traumatic events and their disabling aftereffects. After appearing in journals such as Sixfold and Blue Unicorn, he published a chapbook entitled Immortal Jellyfish (Finishing Line Press, 2023). His emerging work has gained the attention of his local literary community and earned him some modest prizes. When he's not immersed in poetry, he's employed as a civil servant at a public university, supporting himself and his loving partner, James Adriance, a retired critical care nurse, and AIDS survivor. For further reading, please visit perezpoetrystudio.wordpress.com

Alexandra Lytton Regalado

Issue #17 - May 2020

Probably the Most My Father Has Ever Said to Me

After your mother switched off the light I dreamt
little plants grew out of my feet. Not vines, not branches
with leaves, no, it was clover, bright green. It’s the last
thing I remember when the phone rang at 3am,
I picked up, no one was there. In the morning,
still wondering, I walked to the sideyard; the wind
had knocked down the climbing bougainvillea,
yanked down part of the fence; it was all brambles
and thorns and the thick trunk had split, broken
the ceramic pot, ripped its roots from the asphalt.
I’m not sure it can be saved. Each year
your mother lugs the heavy clippers and prunes it back,
gives it shape, always finishes the day with scratches
up her forearms—but she likes to do it; it gives her
pleasure like the way she hoses down the entrance
and sends leaves and berries down little eddies
and into a puddle at the foot of the driveway.
I stood in front of the broken bougainvillea
and looked up at the zigzag of telephone wires
where there was a little brown dove coo-cooing
and I was amazed—the bird turned his head left
and right as it watched two buzzards gliding high
on a thermal and I thought, surely, that brown bird
was looking out for traffic the way a child is taught
to look both ways before crossing a street--
but now on second thought I bet that bird was thinking:
I wish I could do that.

Alexandra Lytton Regalado is a Salvadoran-American author, editor, and translator. She is the author of Relinquenda, winner of the National Poetry Series (Beacon Press, 2022); the chapbook Piedra (La Chifurnia, 2022); and the poetry collection, Matria, the winner of the St. Lawrence Book Award (Black Lawrence Press, 2017). Alexandra holds fellowships at CantoMundo and Letras Latinas; she is winner of the Coniston Prize, and her work has appeared in The Best American Poetry, poets.org, Agni, World Literature Today, Narrative, and The Poetry Foundation’s Harriet blog, among others. Her translations of contemporary Latin American poetry appear in Poetry International, FENCE, and Tupelo Quarterly and she is translator of Family or Oblivion by Elena Salamanca. She is co-founding editor of Kalina, a press that showcases bilingual, Central American-themed books and she is assistant editor at SWWIM Every Day an online daily poetry journal for women-identifying poets. www.alexandralyttonregalado.com

Ricardo Rodriguez

Issue #9 - May 2018

fragments of touch

i think they can smell it,
a lavender-scented boy who likes boys,
& that explains my intimacy with the faceplant on locker room tile,
their hands on the back of my skull
-
recall the time the boys thought it would be funny,
thumbtacks between their fingers,
slapping my back.
now i want to be stronger
so i prescribe a new story to the remembrance:

when the skin was pricked it did not draw blood but light
-
at first i feared the touch of men,
now i crave it
-
now i let the ravenous
pick me up & drive me to their place.
his touch on every part of my body
when i only wanted him on my lips
he tells me his name & i imagine it’s real
until i watch him replace his wedding ring
hidden in his pocket with a picture of a daughter
who he tells me about when dropping me off
-
this yearning for a touch of intimacy
has lead me to bedrooms,
which i mistake for slaughterhouses:
they brim with the echo of animalistic grunts,
rhythmic swings.

something hits the floor lifeless
but doesn’t stay dead
-
though i didn’t seek them,
though i’ve never been fragile with my body,
i know there’s a difference between
pleasure & destruction.
how they are also twins
-
i sought instead placement.
-
his hand up my shirt, down my pants,
as we enter one another--
carnal magic.
these are reversals of my vanishing acts.
i reappear to my body & am reminded
just how physical i am
-
in every stain, every burn, swollen flesh,
every touch.
i am made present-tense

i am, here here & here

At the time of publication, Ricardo Rodriguez was a South Florida-based painter and poet studying for his BFA in painting at Florida Atlantic University. He is currently the Senior Director of Creative Arts at The Milagro Center.

Alfonso "Sito" Sasieta

Issue 22 - August 2021

Originally published as "Why my beloved está equivocada: a family history"
here is the most recent revision retitled "Daily Bread"

Daily Bread

I am sitting on the sofa with my suegro
watching a BBC documentary
on the history of son
we now call salsa
when my even keel
father-in-law leans forward
subtly but eagerly, pointing his finger
towards Ray Barretto’s oversized glasses
& Roberto Roena’s bongos,
smiling at the both of them as though they are long lost brothers
¡y allí está Héctor!
he says, surprising himself
with his own enthusiasm
& proceeding to regale me his teenage
years & how at sixteen he went to San Juan
to see the concert
that we see on this screen,
y es más, he goes on I saw Héctor Lavoe
before he left for Nueva York
which is to say, when the saplings
of son were taking root
here & there & somewhere on the Panamerican highway
between Lima & San Bartolo
my own papi is riding
the green & white
micro, which is the small
crowded bus where he sways,
where he stays vigilant for ladrones
as he grips the chrome
pole & lip syncs the words
to llorarás, llorarás
as he turns his gaze from the Pacific
on his left to the sand
dunes on his right, beyond
which Oscar d’ Leon
y La Dimensión Latina
are performing en vivo en Venezuela
where my suegra is preparing to leave Latinoamérica
for America & sensing perhaps
the impending lack
beyond Caracas, sneaks
out the window of her house
& then dances
all night until she faints
in exhaustion & the raucous
around her rushes her
to the hospital’s IV
to replenish her body with vitamin B
& who could blame her, really, I mean
how was she to know
that she would meet & marry
the dancing boricua who is sitting on my couch
right now?

These vignettes of family
history are enveloped in a larger
story, in which we must travel further
back to Chappotín, Lilí Martínez
Tata Güines, y a todos
los genios como Arsenio
who with blind eyes
& intuitive hands
built a brick-like template
for the son-montuno
& who, with so many other Cubans
laid the groundwork for Celia
to cement the clave
& her tumbao
into our psyches
before shipping them up and down the americas
to all the brown-skinned
like my father
who found himself in a small
Midwestern town,
working well past dusk
in a pizza restaurant,
where often, he’d blare Ojitos Chinos
which, for all intents and purposes, seems racist
to me, but in the long-ago memory etched in my mind,
seems to make my father feel seen
for the Chinese Peruvian
he is & I can hear
my cousins greeting him now--
Tío Chin, Tío Chin!
as they step through the back screen door
of la pizzería,
where a few dusty drawers
housed Grupo Niche & Joe Arroyo & the Latin Brothers
& it must be said that
las caleñas son como las flores
that blossomed into the music
of my life until one day, all the songs
from Colombia
& Spanish Harlem
could not help but salute
Alexander Abreu with whom
la timba se puso sabrosa
con Rosa la Peligrosa
& to this day, I will occasionally
ride la aplanadora de Cuba
& steamroll my two children onto the carpet
floor, because there is no better way to be incarnate
than to gallop into a living room
with Revé’s campaneo de changüi,
or to play the piano tumbao
on my daughter’s knees,
or to hear my son join a chorus
of children who sing
one of the most beautiful
covers of Guantanamera I have ever heard.
Maybe this is what it means
to be Peruvian-American.
Maybe it isn’t. I just know the people of Lima & Callao
have proliferated the son music
that is now my daily
bread & so I am in debt
to how many peoples
God only knows.

Alfonso "Sito" Sasieta is a poet, dancer and caregiver. He dances with the acclaimed Cuban dance company, DC Casineros. His poems have been published in America Media, Cold Mountain Review, Palabritas, The Acentos Review, The Christian Century, and elsewhere.

Cecilia Savala

Issue 34 - August 2024

Song

The rush of traffic sounds like rain.
Birds swim in single file. It’s not a real river.

My son wears a uniform and speaks in code.
It’s not a real badge. He uses his teeth to chip away

at silver paint. Made in America. Made from the tears
of overnight men. Birds sing in waves and foam.

My son wears his hair down over his ears.
He can’t hear the birds. It’s not a real song.

The rain drowns the men on the clean swept sidewalk.
The mantras are metal, real. They puddle, make mirages, disrupt

traffic that sounds like water. My son puts his badge on the table;
he’s clean shaven. He cries for the men on the sidewalk,

becomes like them, silver, feathered. He watches the door,
waits for a flood that doesn’t come.

Cecilia Savala is a Shrek-obsessed Latinx poet, teacher, and mom who writes about fatphobia, body image, and gender 1200 miles from home. She is a morning person, a cat person, an Assistant Director to ASU Writing Programs, and the poetry editor of Hayden’s Ferry Review. She has been anthologized in Curating Home and Lift Every Voice: An Anthology of Poetry, and her work can be found in Red Ogre Review, the Boiler, and Poetry South, among others. Follow her at @cecsav on Instagram

Esperanza Hope Snyder

Issue #11 - November 2018

Immigrant

Because before I could walk my father took me to the embassy in Bogotá
with my first black and white photograph and his own passport,
I used to say this was the only thing he ever did for me. And the best.

No, he didn’t give me Sunday mornings in church, afternoons in the park,
bedtime stories, Happy Birthday calls, wrapped Christmas presents.
From him, no family dinners, money for clothes, or food, or college.

He wasn’t there when my mother, tired of mothering,
locked me in the closet with a bag full of mangoes--I had eaten
a mango without asking--so I would learn to want less, expect less.

In Bogotá, I’d sit under the dining room table, mouth open,
sugar shaker pouring crystals straight on to my tongue. At fifteen,
not knowing what to do with me, my mother brought me here

to live, to study, and to work, so we could pay the rent. I came to this,
my new adopted country, not through a tunnel, or in an overflowing
boat, not locked in a van, but in an airplane, with a passport.

At fifteen, after school, long after I’d lost my taste for sweets,
I sold chocolates in a candy shop. When I walked home
from work at night, alone, or worse, got a ride from a man, my mother,

always distracted with problems of her own, wouldn’t ask what took
me so long. Because my US Passport was the only thing
my father left, when he left--that, and the empty drawers, empty

bank account, my mother’s empty bed, I held on to the document
and what I thought it meant: that I was loved, that I was
wanted, that I was good enough for him, for them.

Esperanza Hope Snyder was born in Colombia and lives in West Virginia. She holds degrees from the College of William and Mary, George Washington, Johns Hopkins, and the University of Manchester. Mother of three children, she is currently the assistant director of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in Sicily and poet laureate of Shepherdstown, West Virginia.

Virgil Suárez

Issue #11 - November 2018

The Lion Head Belt Buckle

My father bought it for me as a gift in the Madrid rastro
near where we lived, new immigrants from Cuba.

The eyes and mane carved deep into the metal, the tip of the nose
already thin with the blush of wear. My mother found a brown

leather strap and made it into a belt with enough slack and holes
to see me wearing it in Los Angeles where we landed next.

My father worked at Los Dos Toros, a meat market run by Papito,
A heavy-set man with a quick smile and when I would visit

the market after school to wait for my father to bring me home,
Papito always talked to me about baseball and his favorite

Cincinnati Reds players. It was there one of his employees,
a skinny man with deep set eyes and crow-feather black

hair would stop me in the narrow hallway by the produce tables
and grab the belt buckle and praise it. All along passing his hand

over my penis. “You are strong,” he would whisper, “like this lion.”
I would recoil from his touch and move away back to the front

where Papito would ask me about what bases I intended
to play next season on Los Cubanitos team. I never told my father,

or anyone, but the afternoon I showed up and the Fire Department
and police and ambulances huddled in the alleyway behind

Los Dos Toros, I knew something terrible had happened. Some
other kid had uttered the man’s groping and insisting on a kiss

in the almacén, the darkened storage room past the meat locker.
And another father had taken matters into his own hands.

But instead I found my father hosing the back door entrance,
washing the blood down to the alleyway. He told me to wait for him

in the car. The paramedics rolled out Papito, shot and dead on a stretcher,
victim of a hold up. The dark Cuban man who’d felt me up time

and again stood in the shade of a tree weeping and kicking the dirt
with blood encrusted shoes. I found out later he was the one who

slammed the assailant against the wall, and beat him unconscious.
Fuerte como un leon. The words fluttered like cow birds in the back

of my mind. Scattershot and ringing like the violence among the men.

Issue #17 - May 2020

The Cotton Ball Queen

In 1970, Havana, Cuba, my mother
took it upon herself to inject

B12 on the butt cheeks of as many
neighbors as brought her doses

and paid for her service.  My mother
wanted to be a nurse but was not

a nurse, but the house filled with women
waiting for their shots and I, at eight,

watched them lower one side of their
pants or shorts or pull up a dress

to expose their flesh to the needle.
The needle disappeared into the flesh.

My mother swabbed their skin
with a cotton ball drenched in alcohol

after each shot and threw it in a bucket
by the kitchen door.  When she was

not looking I reached for a handful
and went outside to look at how

the blood darkened.  I wrapped my
toy soldiers in the used cotton.

They were wounded.  Cuba
was sending military personnel

to Viet Nam.  My mother shot up
more people, “patients,” as she called

them.  When my father came home
there was no trace of anyone ever

been over.  My mother expected
me to keep her secrets.  On the mud

fort I had built in the patio all my
soldiers lay wounded, bloodied

and dying.   At night I dreamt
of the house filling with mother’s

pillow cases full of cotton balls.
In the United States, my mother

worked in a factory, sewing zippers
at 10 cents a piece.  25 years.

She never looked up from her machine.
Her fingers became arthritic . . .

Every time I cut myself shaving, I reach
for a cotton ball to soak up the blood.

Blood is a cardinal taking flight
against the darkening of the sky.

Virgil Suárez was born in Havana, Cuba in 1962. He is the author of four novels, two memoirs, two collections of stories, and eight volumes of poetry, most recently 90 Miles: Selected and New, published by the University of Pittsburgh Press. Currently he is putting the finishing touches on his new book of poems, The Painted Bunting Last Molt. When he is not writing, he is riding his Yamaha V-Star 1100 Classic Motorcycle up and down the Blue Highways of The South. He lives with his wife in Florida. Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/vsuarez666

Jorge Teillier Chile (born in Lautaro in 1935, died in Viña del Mar in 1996.

Issue 19 - November 2020

Para Habla Con Los Muertos

Para hablar con los muertos
hay que elegir palabras
que ellos reconozcan tan facilmente
como sus manos
reconocian el pelaje de sus perros en la oscuridad.
Palabras claras y tranquilas
como el agua del torrente domesticada en la copa
o las sillas ordenadas por la madre
después que se han ido los invitados.
Palabras que la noche acoja
como los pantanos a los fuegos fatuos.

Para hablar con los muertos
hay que saber esperar:
ellos son miedosos
como los primeros pasos de un niño.
Pero si tenemos paciencia
un dia nos responderán
con una hoja de álamo atrapada por un espejo roto,
con una llama de súbito reanimada en la chimenea
con un regreso oscuro de pájaros
frente a la mirada de una muchacha
que aguarda inmóvil en un umbral.

To Talk With the Dead
translated by Holly Iglesias

To talk with the dead
you must choose words
they’d recognize as easily
as their hands recognize
their dog’s coat in the dark.
Words calm and clear
as the torrent tamed in the cup
or the chairs the mother puts back
after the guests have gone.
Words that the night might welcome
like the marsh welcomes a will-o’-the-wisp.

To talk with the dead
you must know how to wait;
they are fearful
like a child’s first steps.
But if you’re patient,
one day they will reply--
with a poplar leaf caught in a broken mirror,
a flame suddenly revived in the hearth,
the dark return of birds
passing a girl who waits, gazing
and still, in the doorway.

Jorge Teillier (Chile, 1935-1996) was one of the most influential Chilean poets of the 20th century and began his literary career as part of the literary group Trilce, which introduced poesía lárica (poetry of the hearth, or of a lost time). He also wrote essays, short stories and journalism, and traveled widely. He was awarded the Gabriela Mistral Prize and Premio Alerce, and his work has been translated into many languages. His poetry collections include For Angels and Sparrows, Trains of the Night and Other Poems, The Memory Tree, Secret Poems, Deaths and Wonders, Letters for Queens of Other Springs, andPoems from the Land of Never-more.

Translation by:
Holly Iglesias’ work includes three books of poetry— Sleeping Things, Angles of Approach, and Souvenirs of a Shrunken World—a critical work, Boxing Inside the Box: Women’s Prose Poetry, and two collaborative chapbooks, Myth America and How to Get Into Trouble. She has been awarded fellowships by the National Endowment for the Arts, the North Carolina Arts Council, the Edward Albee Foundation, and the Massachusetts Cultural Council. Her current project is Theories of Flight, an intergenerational memoir in prose fragments.

Angela Narciso Torres

Issue #12 - February 2019

Ode to a Realistic AM/FM Radio at the St. Philip’s Church Rummage Sale

What drew me was the rectangular squat of it,
the hefty boxful of sound you could plant

on a desk or shelf, its walnut veneer of vinyl
nested among cables, chargers and string lights.

Next to me, a man inspecting a pair of headphones
saw me turn the radio over to check the tag

and smiled, more to himself than at me,
and I don’t know why I told him

my dad had a radio just like it and isn’t it cool,
those three silver knobs and lighted tuning scale

so you can see what station you’re looking for?
He picked up a scratched iPod before I could say,

Look—no battery pack or carrying strap! so when
your mother settles down to her talk show,

she’s bound to stay where she is, paying bills
or reading or filing her nails, just like my dad

when he turned on his shiny Panasonic, permanently
set at DZFX contemporary sound of radio in Makati

while he signed papers or typed on the Smith-Corona
as I sprawled on the rug, knowing he’d stay

riveted until Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7,
performed by the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra

and conducted by Karl Böhm, reached its grand finale.
For now the first movement was just gaining momentum.

It would be a while before the tsunami of brass and strings
that broke through the staticky silence would end

in applause and we’d stand up to do the routine
things around the house—but not yet--

not while that blue spell of sound held us,
pouring from a silver box rooted to the wall

and my father, leaning back in his chair,
eyes fixed in the middle distance between desk

and darkening window, wasn’t going anywhere,
and the burnt orange shag rug beneath me

wasn’t going anywhere.

Angela Narciso Torres is the author of What Happens Is Neither (Four Way Books), Blood Orange (Willow Books Award for Poetry) and the chapbook, To the Bone (Sundress Publications). Her work appears in POETRY, 32 Poems, and Alaska Poetry Review. A graduate of Warren Wilson MFA Program and Harvard Graduate School of Education, Angela has received fellowships from Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, Illinois Arts Council, and Ragdale Foundation. She received the Yeats Poetry Prize (W.B. Yeats Society of New York) and was named one of NewCity Magazine’s Chicago's Lit 50. Born in Brooklyn and raised in Manila, she lives in San Diego and serves as reviews editor for RHINO.

Emma Trelles

Three Poems from Issue #17 - May 2020

The nearest way

Would I consume what I really wanted
only nothing would be left. I am many pigments
maybe you should figure them out, I’m spent from shining
except when I depart, then my antelope heart sends me
north to the high lands, where I glow unseen among the pines.

Leave the rest to me

Warblers summon me and I respond. I’ve never been
one to ignore a flash in the branches. Even what never returns
makes me keep waiting with my coat sailing in this winter spring
enlightenment, the again months when the country scorns
nearly every unbroken wing. I can’t stop it, but I’ll never stop either.

What’s done

When they take both her breasts she is asleep with her daughter
outside praying to a god she doesn’t know but imagines as a drain and she
measures each word and pause with care like another useless spell can
erase what has happened. No one says amputation. No one warns of the tubes where
nipples once were now suctioning the leftovers. It is more awful than that. Everyone is grateful.

Emma Trelles is a Cuban-American writer and author of Tropicalia (University of Notre Dame Press), winner of the Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize. She’s the 9th poet laureate of Santa Barbara, California, a Poet Laureate Fellow at the Academy of American Poets, an Established Artist Fellow at the California Arts Council, and a current CantoMundo fellow. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Poetry; Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly; Split This Rock: A Social Justice Poetry Database; and others. She is the series editor of the Alta California Chapbook Prize, open to Latine writers and published in bilingual editions by Gunpowder Press. www.emmatrelles.com

Ana Valdarrama Lemus

First Place Winner of the First Annual South Florida Maureen Seaton Poetry Prize as judged by Samuel Ace in March 2024

Dos patrias tengo yo

1° Pseudo-scientific Stockholm Syndrome-type love, I seen it in the articles my father pretends
to care about, I know it’s hard to picture, but I’ve lived it: hate the land that raised you cause He
let you go like you was made of asphalt, love a place you wanna hate cause you don’t know how
to, capitalist-hellscapes don’t seem so bad when you’re not the one exploited, I learned that one
when I showed off my all-American teeth to my ESL teacher. Patriotism got me singing Ol’
Yeller like an anthem, get me rootbeer and a flag, I’ll pop a squat in this cemetery, just close my
eyes for me, don’t see why I can’t walk blind if y’all do, get your groceries and pack it up, we’re
skipping town, road trip through somebody’s land, we real movie stars in one of those James
Dean pictures, put me in black and white, and get off the screen, hypocrite, we singing some
industry plant 2000s pop before the hurricane blows our heads off, I got nine minutes to live and
you ain’t worth one.

2° Muy original, la chamba, como canta esa niña el himno nacional — ¿explícame qué quiere
decir patria? No es querer muerte ni sangre, pero amar la patria como el aire, quiero ver la lluvia
desde el techo de la iglesia, lávame el alma que me siento sucia, ahogame que si tengo que morir
será por tus manos, Dios, no entiendo como se puede vivir así. Ain’t no Western film decoration
pistols on mantelpieces next to deer heads, this the real thing, no article’s gonna make you feel
sympathy you ain’t felt before, stop thinking about theory and see it in practice: Ven a ver la
sangre por las calles, no storm’s gonna wash the blood off your hands, look around. Life is
primitive cause you made it that way, this used to be something. Always stealing shit and
pointing fingers, got your name written on more funeral notices than not, talking about some
some good ol’ country loving that comes with a shotgun to the head. Can’t forget about no
crimes on a road trip cause where we driving when you burned the damn car? Always picking up
after you, I’m sick of it, that’s why Hell is full. You don’t deserve to kill this place even though I
want it dead, that’s some corpses I’m never gonna stop hearing above your screaming, I rather
die first if it means I’ll haunt your children long enough for them to feel some sort of shame.

Ana Valdarrama Lemus named winner of the First Annual Maureen Seaton Poetry Prize by Samuel Ace in March 2024.

Julio César Villegas

Issue 32 - February 2024

frank e rodgers blvd

bullets in rum barrels water our villagers’ mouths.
neither diplomat nor archbishop refute this fact, &
laws were passed a week ago proving this to be true.

some say Clemente could hit a comet blindfolded,
or that Melquiades’ final alchemy was our attention,
María Sabina’s pedagogy, a hand unraveling inertia:

twirling a falling house inside my palm, over and over.
separating theory from truth, tigers from theologians,
lockpicking a keyless basement door out of ignorance.

entire octave of my first mentor’s keyboard smuggled,
rearranged, internalized: you’ll hear every chord today,
the same way I heard them looking at Saint Sebastian.

in the middle of confessing my parents’ sins, once rain
weds to stained glass in the backrows of the church―
a local little leaguer hit his first homer of the season.

when asked about the incident, he apologizes profusely
repeating he didn’t mean to scare awake the windows.
all he remembers was closing eyes, swinging at comets

so magma enters igneous,       ignorance incites invention
introversions interpolate         inquisitions institutionalize :
innocence for ingrates             incineration for the illiterate

there are hypotheses for why there’s glass in the Atacama,
& our textbook’s page can’t hold sand at terminal velocity.
climb atop the observatory, dissuade yourself from inertia.

no longer a drunk with a musket, a helicoptered legislator,
but an unidentified species of promise given a confessional   :
forgive me father, it’s been childhoods since I’ve held comets.

Julio César Villegas
Born in San Juan, Puerto Rico — raised in Essex County, New Jersey.

Puerto Rico Se Levanta.