SoFloPoJo - Celebration of Hispanic Heritage Month
Poetry from the SoFloPoJo archives featuring:
Richard Blanco, Oliver Brantome, Sandra M. Castillo, Adrian Castro, Adrian Ernesto Cepeda, Sylvia Curbelo, Josh Fernandez, LC Gutierrez, Lola Haskins, Jose Hernandez Diaz, Carolina Hospital, Holly Iglesias, Lúcia Leão, Alexandra Lytton Regalado, Rita Maria Martinez, Juan Pablo Mobili, Caridad Moro-Gronlier, Angela Narciso Torres, Sergio Ortiz, Alexander Pérez, Ricardo Rodriquez, Alfonso Sito Sasieta, Esperanza Snyder, Virgil Suárez, Emma Trelles
Richard Blanco, Oliver Brantome, Sandra M. Castillo, Adrian Castro, Adrian Ernesto Cepeda, Sylvia Curbelo, Josh Fernandez, LC Gutierrez, Lola Haskins, Jose Hernandez Diaz, Carolina Hospital, Holly Iglesias, Lúcia Leão, Alexandra Lytton Regalado, Rita Maria Martinez, Juan Pablo Mobili, Caridad Moro-Gronlier, Angela Narciso Torres, Sergio Ortiz, Alexander Pérez, Ricardo Rodriquez, Alfonso Sito Sasieta, Esperanza Snyder, Virgil Suárez, Emma Trelles
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.
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.
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
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 own someone else’s ropa--
cochino clothes 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
rosy roja caramella tan cara
cheeks. What mi Mami never
wanted to entender 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 matrimono
boda dress. Holding 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
the hombre who once sported
the azul prom tuxedo suit,
almost pristine with a hint
of Southern Comfort, stains
of chaser memories of Old
Style cerveza tell me this
chico never found his lucky
señorita, or else he would
have kept and treasured his
suerte, buena threads that
ooze smooth cool like
a Fonzi 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 scent
you could tell she didn’t want
all the lonely neighborhood
esposas y las divorciadas
sniffing around her once malo
bad boy, now tamed sin
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, I could hear
mi Mami ordering me to
wash and lávate sus manos
sucias —she not knowing
in my closet I scored a vintage
blanco y negro camisa, perfecto
para Mardi Gras, she may never
enterder giving new life to
a shirt like this, yearning
to experience new skin, placing
mi oreja to the fabric and feel
their anticipación so many
stories these colores, pockets
and collars ready to behold.
Thrift Store Mysteries
I can still hear her, mi Mami
porque, why would you want
to own someone else’s ropa--
cochino clothes 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
rosy roja caramella tan cara
cheeks. What mi Mami never
wanted to entender 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 matrimono
boda dress. Holding 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
the hombre who once sported
the azul prom tuxedo suit,
almost pristine with a hint
of Southern Comfort, stains
of chaser memories of Old
Style cerveza tell me this
chico never found his lucky
señorita, or else he would
have kept and treasured his
suerte, buena threads that
ooze smooth cool like
a Fonzi 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 scent
you could tell she didn’t want
all the lonely neighborhood
esposas y las divorciadas
sniffing around her once malo
bad boy, now tamed sin
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, I could hear
mi Mami ordering me to
wash and lávate sus manos
sucias —she not knowing
in my closet I scored a vintage
blanco y negro camisa, perfecto
para Mardi Gras, she may never
enterder giving new life to
a shirt like this, yearning
to experience new skin, placing
mi oreja to the fabric and feel
their anticipación so many
stories these colores, pockets
and collars ready to behold.
Adrian Ernesto Cepeda is the author of the full-length poetry collection Flashes & Verses… Becoming Attractions from Unsolicited Press, the poetry chapbook So Many Flowers, So Little Time from Red Mare Press, Between the Spine published with Picture Show Press and La Belle Ajar, a collection of cento poems inspired by Sylvia Plath’s 1963 novel published by CLASH Books. You can connect with Adrian on his website:
http://www.adrianernestocepeda.com/
http://www.adrianernestocepeda.com/
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.
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.
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.
LC Gutierrez
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.
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 South and the Caribbean, as well as writing and comparative literature programs at Louisiana State and Tulane University. An erstwhile academic, he now writes, teaches and plays trombone in Madrid, Spain. His poetry is most recently published or forthcoming in Autofocus Lit Mag, Notre Dame Review, and Haight Ashbury Literary Journal.
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.
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.
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
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 lives in Gainesville. FL. Her poetry has appeared widely in literary magazines. She has published 16 books, 13 of which are poetry. Her most recent collection―Asylum: Improvisations on John Clare (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019)―was featured in the NY Times Sunday Magazine. Past honors include the Iowa Poetry Prize, two NEAs, two Florida Book Awards, and the Emily Dickinson prize from Poetry Society of America. She serves as Honorary Chancellor of the Florida State Poets Association.
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,
Because of my Brown skin.
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,
Because of my Brown skin.
Jose Hernandez Diaz is a 2017 NEA Poetry Fellow. He is the author of The Fire Eater (Texas Review Press, 2020). His work appears in The American Poetry Review, Bennington Review, Conduit, Crazyhorse, Georgia Review, Huizache, Iowa Review, The Journal, Los Angeles Review, The Missouri Review, Northwest Review, Poetry, Southeast Review, The Southern Review, Witness Magazine, The Yale Review, and in The Best American Nonrequired Reading Anthology 2011. He teaches creative writing online and edits for Frontier Poetry.
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.
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), The Child of Exile (Arte Público Press), and Myth America, a collaboration with Maureen Seaton, Holly Iglesias and Nicole Hospital-Medina (Anhinga Press). She has edited two anthologies of Cuban American literature and her work has appeared in numerous national publications, such as the Norton Anthology of Latino Literature and Bedford/St. Martin’s Florida Literature. She lives between Miami and Palm Coast, Florida.
Holly Iglesias
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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. |
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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 is the author of three collections of poetry— Sleeping Things, Angles of Approach, and Souvenirs of a Shrunken World—as well as a critical work, Boxing Inside the Box: Women’s Prose Poetry. 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, and teaches in the University of Miami MFA Program in Creative Writing, with a focus on archival and documentary poetry.
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
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.
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
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
LUCIA LEAO is a translator and writer. Her poems have been published in Chariton Review, SoFloPoJo, and in Brazilian websites dedicated to poetry. 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 bachelor’s degree in English and Literatures from Rio de Janeiro State University, Rio de Janeiro (UERJ), a master’s degree in Brazilian Literature from UERJ and a master’s in print journalism from University of Miami. She was born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
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.
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
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 Mount Olympus. 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.
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 Mount Olympus. 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 collection, The Jane and Bertha in Me, celebrates Charlotte Brontë’s classic novel. Her work has appeared in Ploughshares, Notre Dame Review, and The Best American Poetry Blog. She is a guest contributor for the Poets & Artists blog and lives in Miami. Visit her at http://comeonhome.org/wordpress_development.
Juan Pablo Mobili
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.
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.
Juan Pablo Mobili was born in Buenos Aires, and adopted by New York. His poems appeared in The American Journal of Poetry, The Worcester Review, Otoliths (Australia) Impspired (UK), and Bosphorus Review of Books (Turkey) among others. His work received an Honorable Mention from the International Human Rights Art Festival, and nominations for the Pushcart Prize and the Best of the Net, in 2020 and 2021. His chapbook, Contraband, was published this year.
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.
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.
CARIDAD MORO-GRONLIER is the award winning author of Visionware published by Finishing Line Press as part of its New Women's Voices Series. She is the recipient of an Elizabeth George Foundation Grant and a Florida Individual Artist Fellowship in poetry. Her work has appeared in the Pintura/Palabra Project-Our America: The Latino Presence in American Art, Bridges To/From Cuba, The Antioch Review, The Tishman Review, The Cossack Review, Moon City Review, The Damfino Review, The Collapsar, The Notre Dame Review, The Comstock Review, This Assignment Is So Gay: LGBTIQ Poets on the Art of Teaching, The Lavender Review, and others. In 2016 she was awarded a Unity Coalition Educator Leadership Award and was also named a 2017 Francisco R. Walker Teacher of the Year Award nominee. She is a dual-enrollment English instructor for Miami Dade Public Schools, an English professor for Miami Dade College and the Editor-In-Chief of The Orange Island Review. She resides in Miami, FL with her wife and son.
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.
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’s poetry collection, Blood Orange, won the Willow Books Literature Award. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Colorado Review, Nimrod, Quarterly West, The Missouri Review, and Spoon River Poetry Review. A graduate of Warren Wilson’s MFA Program and Harvard Graduate School of Education, Torres has received fellowships from Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Illinois Arts Council, and Ragdale Foundation. Born in Brooklyn and raised in Manila, she serves as the reviews editor for RHINO and an editorial panelist for New England Review.
Sergio Ortiz
The Noise ( Issue #21 - May 2021)
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.
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.
Sergio A. Ortiz is a retired English literature professor and bilingual gay poet. His recent credits include Spanish audio poems in GATO MALO Editing, an important Spanish Caribbean publication, Maleta Ilegal, a South American journal, Indolent Books, HIV HERE AND NOW, Communicators League, Rats Ass Review, Spillwords and several other journals and anthologies.
Alexander Pérez
dress-up Issue 27 - November 2022
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 choose 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.
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 choose 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 (he/him/his), gay, Hispanic/Latino, in 2022, has published poetry in Queer Toronto Literary Magazine, New Note Poetry Magazine, Variety Pack Literary Magazine, Literary Yard, The Voices Project, and Whiskey Blot.
Ricardo Rodriguez
fragments of touch Issue #9 - May 2018
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
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
Why my beloved está equivocada: a family history (Issue 22 - August 2021)
I am sitting on the sofa with my suegro
watching a BBC documentary
on the history of 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 very concert
that we see on this screen, y es más, he goes on
I saw Héctor Lavoe
before he joined Fania All Stars
which is to say, when the seedling of salsa
was just taking root in New York
& here & there
& somewhere on the Panamerican highway between Lima & San Bartolo
my own father
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 & quitely
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 Andean house
& 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
y no, no, ¡es demasiado! I say to my beloved
chronicling the long lineage of boleros
from which we come, recalling the way
her papi’s parents danced
into marriage, the same way my papi’s parents
did on that fateful night in Lima
when la virgín maría told papapa that he’d meet his wife
at the so & so building in San Borja
but for now, let’s stay with Arsenio Rodriguez
who with blind eyes & intuitive hands
laid the brick-like template for salsa dura
& who, from the rural of Cuba
laid the groundwork for Celia Cruz
to cement the clave & the tumbao
into our psyches before shipping them up and down the americas
for all the brown skinned
like my father
who found himself on the border
of a sundown town in a sundown county
perpetually working
at dusk
in a pizza restaurant
where he is blaring 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
house 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
amongst the many songs from Harlem
& Havana
& below the stacks
of my childhood soundtrack, there is a hidden
home video where my mother is puckering
her lips
& uncovering a secret
sexiness that has just spawned
from one of Chichi Peralta’s songs
& her fast-forwarding is too late,
for she, too, has been wooed
into the million roots that are jutting & reaching
their tentacles into the lush soil
of our diaspora, preparing me
for my first week in DC
when only three days
after we had met, my soon-to-be partner
turned on un verano en nueva york
& then grabbed my hand
& then shook the ancestors awake & then said yes
to salsa dancing
as a Lenten practice
& like all relationships
we still argue about whether or not love
is a choice or some other thing that spans decades
& continents & hundreds of hands
that hold
the clave
I am sitting on the sofa with my suegro
watching a BBC documentary
on the history of 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 very concert
that we see on this screen, y es más, he goes on
I saw Héctor Lavoe
before he joined Fania All Stars
which is to say, when the seedling of salsa
was just taking root in New York
& here & there
& somewhere on the Panamerican highway between Lima & San Bartolo
my own father
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 & quitely
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 Andean house
& 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
y no, no, ¡es demasiado! I say to my beloved
chronicling the long lineage of boleros
from which we come, recalling the way
her papi’s parents danced
into marriage, the same way my papi’s parents
did on that fateful night in Lima
when la virgín maría told papapa that he’d meet his wife
at the so & so building in San Borja
but for now, let’s stay with Arsenio Rodriguez
who with blind eyes & intuitive hands
laid the brick-like template for salsa dura
& who, from the rural of Cuba
laid the groundwork for Celia Cruz
to cement the clave & the tumbao
into our psyches before shipping them up and down the americas
for all the brown skinned
like my father
who found himself on the border
of a sundown town in a sundown county
perpetually working
at dusk
in a pizza restaurant
where he is blaring 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
house 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
amongst the many songs from Harlem
& Havana
& below the stacks
of my childhood soundtrack, there is a hidden
home video where my mother is puckering
her lips
& uncovering a secret
sexiness that has just spawned
from one of Chichi Peralta’s songs
& her fast-forwarding is too late,
for she, too, has been wooed
into the million roots that are jutting & reaching
their tentacles into the lush soil
of our diaspora, preparing me
for my first week in DC
when only three days
after we had met, my soon-to-be partner
turned on un verano en nueva york
& then grabbed my hand
& then shook the ancestors awake & then said yes
to salsa dancing
as a Lenten practice
& like all relationships
we still argue about whether or not love
is a choice or some other thing that spans decades
& continents & hundreds of hands
that hold
the clave
Alfonso Sito Sasieta is a Peruvian-American poet based in Washington DC. Half-Lutheran & half-Peruvian, he enjoys playing with the dialects & cultural ways of being he inherited from both sides of his family. Alfonso works in an intentional community called L'Arche, where adults with and without intellectual disabilities share their lives together. His work is forthcoming in L'Arche GWDC and L'Arche USA.
Esperanza Snyder
Immigrant Issue #11 - November 2018
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.
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 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
The Lion Head Belt Buckle Issue #11 - November 2018
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.
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.
The Cotton Ball Queen (Issue 17 - May 2020)
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.
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
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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 is the author of three collections of poetry— Sleeping Things, Angles of Approach, and Souvenirs of a Shrunken World—as well as a critical work, Boxing Inside the Box: Women’s Prose Poetry. 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, and teaches in the University of Miami MFA Program in Creative Writing, with a focus on archival and documentary poetry.
Translation by:
Holly Iglesias is the author of three collections of poetry— Sleeping Things, Angles of Approach, and Souvenirs of a Shrunken World—as well as a critical work, Boxing Inside the Box: Women’s Prose Poetry. 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, and teaches in the University of Miami MFA Program in Creative Writing, with a focus on archival and documentary poetry.
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.
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 the daughter of Cuban immigrants and the author of Tropicalia (University of Notre Dame Press), winner of the Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize, a finalist for Foreword/Indies poetry book of the year, and a recommended read by The Rumpus. She is currently writing a second book of poems, Courage and the Clock. Her work has been anthologized in Verse Daily, Best American Poetry, Best of the Net, Political Punch: Contemporary Poems on the Politics of Identity, and others. Recent poems appear or are forthcoming in Salt, SWWIM, Zócalo Public Square, the Colorado Review, Spillway, and the Miami Rail. A CantoMundo Fellow and a recipient of an Individual Artist Fellowship from the Florida Division of Cultural Affairs, she lived and worked for many years as an arts journalist in South Florida and now lives with her husband in California, where she teaches at Santa Barbara City College and curates the Mission Poetry Series.