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"let me ask you, tehuatzin ti Mexikatl?"

1/28/2020

Two poems from Chicago
By Carlos Cumpián

Yo Homie, Mexica Tiacauh!

I’ve seen all kinds of wild jive on high school tee shirts;
pornographic graphics, praises to those who drug traffic,
mean defamation of people from other nations,
angry tweeties and sweeties, amid shout outs to dead family and friends,
oversized visages of villains like Al Capone, Scarface Carlitos el buey,
Marilyn Manson and CD gangsters with their gats blasting.
Occasionally brown eagle and snake over red, white and green,
school of hard knocks drop outs, Phat Farm crop pickers, (Farmers Used to Beat Us),
NASCAR cultists, surfer symbols for those that perch 1,000 miles from an ocean,
there’s even Commies como el Ché with rainbow beret suggesting he was gay.
Then there’s sport’s insults like the Cleveland Indians Illinois’ Chief One Lamewick,
political campaign slogans for schmoes not worth the voting,
and logos from South Pole, el gringo Tommy, even Puffy’s ex-mommy,
there are tee-shirts for beer drinking, and tee-shirts that prove no one was thinking when they went shopping.

But why haven’t I seen one with the greeting,
“Mexica Tiacauh” on even one pinche tee-shirt?
Maybe because we don’t speak Mexican, and Español clashes
with words prior to Mexico lindo losing its own kapullis,
which made the 15th century Spanish arsonists happy. OK, what’s kapulli, you say?

That’s Nahuatl or Aztecan for school,
but maybe you don’t like skool or escuela tampoco,
and there’s barely a kapulli that’s open
while you’re sleeping in the middle of the day,
but imagine what our tee-shirts could say
if Nahuatl had it not been smothered
under the tongues of the foreign ones?
Mokalli Kuate could be today’s “homie” carnal,
have you ever thought this really means?
“My house is your house?”
or “Mi casa es su casa”
(don’t you especially love it when Anglos tell you that?)
in turn we need say, tú tierra es mi tierra,
“This land is your land, and this land is my land”
como dice el folkie Woody Guthrie,

Entonces Mexica Tiacauh, Kah mokal mokalli ese kuate!
Don’t be afraid to say it!
We affirm that it’s our turn to go forward,
advancing as you help others.
In Nahuatl, yo soy un xochitlahtoani,
that’s flowery speaker or poeta,
but so many juicy words were
reduced to fragments
over the draining
amargo centuries,
leaving but a few palabras
to heat our chocolate and our chili,
mi estimado amigo con
su cara del nopalito
let me ask you,
tehuatzin ti Mexikatl*?

*(are you Mexican?)

Chupacabra Furlough

Wake up, moco, it’s just after three
in the morning, my Tejano connections
have sent me some direct impeccable proof
from the Lower Rio Grande Valley.
Attached is a plethora of film footage,
it’s what we’ve been waiting for because
experts found no image manipulation
of this elusive fast-footed creature now
captured on a sheriff’s dashboard camera.
Deputy Zavala and Ms. Dulce Mora of Falfurrias
offered indispensable first-hand testimonies
with even a notarized statement
from a priest Raúl Niño de San Benito.

I think we’re beginning to agree éste chiquito
Chupacabra
is no more mito than you or me.
It’s no fable, it’s neither unicorn nor minotaur,
It’s not some hydra-headed Argus from days of yore,
this ain’t no Monterey-mountain-top flying bruja
causing a piss-ant rookie to camera cry for primero impacto.

We know the critter’s etymology comes straight from Spanish
with Latin roots, for to suck is chupar and cabra is goat.
Question numero uno is where did this diablo came from?
Where indeed did this beast first appear – was it on
the Carib island of Borinquen, or do you still say Puerto Rico?
Lest we forget its initial reports,
how this creature dashed about old Rich Port
with the speed of a swiftly pitched baseball,
until one night, when people on an old jibaro’s farm
stopped still in their tracks
to witness the union of the yet unclassified beast
having a liquid meal out of a skinny goat’s neck.

It’s as if some strange hurricane flung this crypto-species
critter out from the bowels of deepest Africa with
no documentation, always on furlough from the
annals of discoveries, this genetic cul-de-sac
just appeared, all weird dog and Komodo dragon-like,
with bristles and quarry-ripping claws,
red eyed and ready to roam off shore,
coño scary perro!
some barrio kids said,
when pictures and drawings of it
appeared in San Juan’s news the next day.
Relax, we’re safe in Humboldt Park
(but watch out Hyde Park)
por que esa sucker wouldn’t find enuf
blood to live on
after Chicago’s mosquitoes
do their picnicking in July.

Carlos Cumpián was born and raised in Texas and now lives in Chicago. He is the author of the poetry collections Coyote Sun (1990), Armadillo Charm (1996), and 14 Abriles (2010), as well as the children's book Latino Rainbow: Poems About Latino Americans (1995, illustrated by Richard Leonard). His poems have appeared in many anthologies, including Emergency Tacos: Seven Poets con Picante, With a Book in Their Hands: Chicano Readers and Readership Across the Centuries, Hecho en Tejas: An Anthology of Texas Mexican Literature, Dream of a Word: The Tia Chucha Press Poetry Anthology, and El Coro: A Chorus of Latino and Latina Poetry. Cumpián edits March Abrazo Press and teaches high school English in Chicago.

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"twilight sacrifices of grass and fingers"

1/20/2020

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Un par de poemas
Por/by Ivan Argüelles

devuélveme la vida !
Poema para Hector Zamudio

Hector son of Hector ! myth and hieroglyph
and drizzling sun of Teotihuacan the many vowels
it takes to make a rope that climbs to the heavens
rock over rock masonry of the gods chiseled out of
basalt and quartz doorways and portals to infinity
blood-stone and flint and the myriads of hearts
tossed against the angry walls of eternity
Corazón ! if nothing is sacred then everything is Holy !
up and down the ghostly ramps and suddenly
the horse is invented and ruddy beards and white masks
and gun-powder reeking clouds all in Spanish
boats that sail the eternal skies above Texcoco
Madre de Dios ! sunslant and orient of the New World
megalopolis of serapes and Calaveras de azúcar
sleepless hydras and footless vendors of chili verde
rites of the necklaces of the dead and talking mummies
stalking the Zócalo and Paseo de la Reforma
remunerations of saints who have never seen the Cordillera
or the Carretera Panamerican and who have never slept
in the roofless motels of Yucatan’s insomniac peninsula
or deciphered thought-patterns of the Mayan prophets
twenty eight perfect days on a wheel that never turns !
Hector son of Hector ! you travel back and forth
on an invisible thread of saliva talking backwards
to priests of Coatlicue and dredging liquid infernos
that slumber beneath Avenida Insurgentes
when you wake up it’s in Los Angeles wearing
Boyle Heights mambo zoot suit but
when you pull night over your embroidered skull
it’s in Coyoacán and you are Cuauhtémoc on your knees
before a shrine to Frieda Kahlo and the histories
of five hundred years unravel on the destroyed syllables
of Quetzalcoatl and the wind is great with abortions
and embryos wrapped up like tamales and loud
sirens of mediodia in the midst of Zapatistas and
Cristeros who are packing a movie theater and shooting
stars on the painted ceiling putting civilization to an end
there is no frontera no nocturnal bus ride to a urinal
just south of Ciudad Juárez where the uncounted
assassinations of women keep being ignored
there is only the imperfect literature of papel higiénico
and the eyeless stumps of beggars pidiendo limosna
stoned on illegal vats of pulque or mezcal
and the enormous illegible map of Distrito Federal
crumpled shat upon and ripped into uneven hemispheres
where mindlessly jaywalking the mad poet Santiago Papasquiaro
meets death for maybe the second time
devuélveme la vida !

Photo by Scott Duncan-Fernandez

APUNTES PARA LA MEMORIA

am I the equivalent of my father ?
how can we be who we are ?
his was the gift of music
66 years ago drove through Oklahoma
and Texas into Mexico on
the Carretera Panamericana all the way
to Teotihuacan which was a revelation
like a Sanskrit dictionary full of sun syllables
both pyramids to be climbed and conquered
the heights ! everything happened then
when he died it was the 3rd movement
of Beethoven’s Ninth // waves of sound
Aztecs transformed into shirts of light
transparencies of back and forth up and down
fireflies woven through the string section
followed by the lonely and brief horn solo
motels adobe stucco sleep heat oblivion
pan mohoso joyezuelas cazabe cues
the world is defined by the vowel it lacks
nevertheless
twilight sacrifices of grass and fingers
blood : the planet Mars !
it’s in the dictionary and like music
must be mysterious shapeless drum and drifting
into the rust of the cosmos
the ear in the rust of the cosmos
corn fields and motels motor oil seeping
through clouds higher than Tenochtitlan
siesta on stone pillows dreaming ancient
// scarab and Toltec heat ceremony
black sun in the center of the lizard’s eye
yellow grain reaping tears
modulated skies in the key of Delta
home in a refrigerator !
what are words for ?
wearing corn skirts the serpent goddess
flint knife obsidian blade , mi corazón !
the book of canonical divides
photocopies of a language possibly
Anatolian in origin , rogations
and a fierce god imitating human sorrow
descending above the milky cordillera
when it will be dawn again and forever
his breath always masked by sweets
to hide the alcohol hands deftly on the Wheel
moving through topographies of rock
vastness of pre-history and sandstone
up to the wrist in water the flowers
dazed corollaries of thought
migration of names like birds
in the depths of dreams rings inks
mosquito coast with canoes
ambush ! Aiyeee flechas y rodelas
tell me with what you write
and I’ll tell you who you are
pésimas cartas ! a fling with memory
each photograph precisely measured for
shade the way the bedrooms slant the oval
where they keep vanished cigarettes
prayer wheels and monographs about ant-hostilities
stylistics and devouring human cause
the greater gods on their tight-rope
drove several thousand miles across the Rio Grande
hurts the eyes the desert light
how did we become who we thought we were ?
in front of the Palacio de Bellas Artes
posing for a portrait in cinematic sepia
hair glazed brow smoothed by flat conjecture
guitars splashing nostalgic fountains
la hija de Don Juan Alba
dice que quiere ser monja !
it was in high school on the fortieth floor
a señorita with bougainvillea for hair
grammar lessons annexed to a single verb
to dispel dust and twilight
listening to the broken dream-speech
recover from memory the outline
of distance
// transformed by the march up-country
returned to photographic chiaroscuro
as if scouring the sun for wounds
the cicatrix of identity
66 years in a thumbnail sketch
childhood’s dead actors
who once lit up the summer stages
performing cigarettes and shoe-wax
the lifetime it took to get this far
Spanish and its suburban pools
dereliction of the Path
righteousness and fireflies
in which porch did one era end
and another begin ?
the world’s toxic dance !
in the finish each gets his role
and sooner forget than drive
into the Sierra Maestra
calling out Oh Diego ! Oh Diego !
escribir más es una locura !
set sail in eleven ghost ships
a crew of three hundred and fifty
hidalgos all indebted to the king
promised more gold than it was worth
a life a breath a ransomed leaf
mountains shivered into hemispheres
and questioned the half a dozen
who were at the bar that night
no one remembered seeing
María de la Luz //
the biography of Enrique Sabino
concludes here its tonal architecture
of neo-baroque fugue and spit
the land goes down dark
and hear no more the cadence
of footfall and lung
death the señorita shaking
her life-length hair
and guitars splashing endless inks
la hija de Don Juan Alba
dice que quiere ser monja !
am I the equivalent of my father ?

September 15, 2019

Ivan Argüelles

 Editor's note: Hector Zamudio is a young poet who lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. A poem of his about Tenochtitlan inspired Arguelles to write this piece.

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

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POETRY
POESÍA

"let me ask you, tehuatzin ti Mexikatl?"

Two poems from Chicago
By Carlos Cumpián

Yo Homie, Mexica Tiacauh!

Chupacabra Furlough

"twilight sacrifices of grass and fingers"

Un par de poemas
Por/by Ivan Argüelles

devuélveme la vida !
Poema para Hector Zamudio

APUNTES PARA LA MEMORIA

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POETRY​POESÍA

"let me ask you, tehuatzin ti Mexikatl?"

Two poems from Chicago​By Carlos Cumpián

​Yo Homie, Mexica Tiacauh!

Chupacabra Furlough

"twilight sacrifices of grass and fingers"

Un par de poemas​Por/by Ivan Argüelles

devuélveme la vida !Poema para Hector Zamudio

​APUNTES PARA LA MEMORIA

Archives

Categories

HOME/INICIO

​ABOUT/SOBRE

SUBMIT/ENVIAR

​SUPPORT/​APOYAR

Donate and Make Literature Happen

POETRY
POESÍA

Two poems from Chicago
By Carlos Cumpián

Yo Homie, Mexica Tiacauh!

Un par de poemas
Por/by Ivan Argüelles

devuélveme la vida !
Poema para Hector Zamudio

APUNTES PARA LA MEMORIA

ABOUT/SOBRE

SUPPORT/APOYAR