​​ by Sylvia Eugenia

the mother in your memory movie reminds me. my own mother in real life.
palpably uncomfortable. polite. Puetoricenio en tu vida. instead
pero…skin tone…voice tone…thats them (thats us) same but different
I want to hear your friend speak in Spanish. Will you tell him? …the street makes
us a threesome…I'm Poly for the art scene.
When it was once then for a life time, they remember. I see the halo glow of a martyr to a mind. Your brain shares that
similar smile to mine and no one knows what resides inside. Between us. Asimilar.
dissimilar. unsimilar. to the outside. Someone tugged you out under this sun and
brought that bloodline out with it. Pushed out another one constantly cradling
their own demons.
 
Now stuck with the only them, the only I. I dreamt I had your swagger. Alone in a
city park at night imagining the world, I'd be terrified. I can't run. The fear comes
up fast. Predicted from in between my legs. My night sky is a retired ceiling fan
casting shadows like a flower with only half its petals remaining.
 
This is how I learned to bring a deadish body down the stairs.
 
Slipping to the trip, my shins would be scraped shreds. Lead legs.
Head over heels my arrogance of the assumed ease brings me to the slip and slide
plastic of a gurney ride
I'm over the concrete edge. gums dangling meat threads ...curbstomp of
consequence
Sputtering up snake eyes in teeth. rolling against the roof
 
I've seen parts of this movie, watched gravity pull her to concrete like a
desperate, disheveled…lover? beloved? hard-up darling? Flat down hard fuck.
Only they share that collision despite those who watch and think they feel the
crash. Bone to brick, rail against cheek. A mouth first tastes copper-lemon from
the side. An unfinished european kiss

​​Sylvia Eugenia combines elements of fiction and memoir into a prose poetry.
Her poems have no structure except, the pauses in her breath and metronome of her heartbeat.
​
She graduated from Mills College, Oakland, California, with a BA in English, with an emphasis in Creative Writing. She has presented her work at many small readings in Southern California and the San Francisco Bay Area. In 2013, she performed at Beast Crawl in Oakland and Lit. Crawl in San Francisco. She lives in Santa Cruz, Cali.​

Z is for Zapatazo 
 
I started learning my ABC’s before I could even read. The first lesson involved a woman collapsed in the back lot of the Bronx tenement where we lived. Something had scared her nearly to death. There in the pouring rain she lay writhing and screaming out her wits while neighbors watched from the covered balconies and fire escapes. R is for Rat.
 
Another lesson was connected to chickens in that time when “children should be seen and not heard.” The Spanish version had, as usual, more syllables as well as color: “Los niños hablan cuando las gallinas mean.” “Children talk when the chickens pee.” Those who relate to chicken only in conveniently dismembered extra crispy form may ask when or how often do chickens pee? Never. We Nuyoricans, Spanglish-speaking Gothamites, who had never seen a chicken except when it arrived steaming aromatically on a plate with rice and beans, nevertheless knew well that chickens don’t relieve themselves like little boys and girls. C is for Chickens.
 
We moved to California, that hub of social contradictions. There I was raised on breezy primetime shows, punctuated by interruptions about some protest march, police suppression, riot, space-race launch, cold war threat, assassination, or other scary event. For a while it seemed like “We Interrupt This Program” was part of the regular TV line up. Maybe that’s why there were so many sitcoms and family shows – diversions from the worry and sheer terror. The shows conveyed placid American suburbs lined with houses that never needed painting, populated by families like the Andersons, the Nelsons, and the Cleavers, lovingly and rationally ruled by parents that never yelled or hit or even had sex.
 
Meanwhile, on this side of the fourth wall, verbal and physical discipline was natural. So natural in fact that it was conveyed in a Spanish-language ABC book for children. The benign English version that the Cleavers read had, “A is for Apple, B is for Ball, C is for Cat” and so on, to the last letter, “Z is for Zoo.” A logical entry for the Spanish Zeta (Z) would have been Zapato (Shoe), something every Latino child would know. But instead it read, “Z es por Zapatazo” (paraphrased: Z is for Shoe Missile). The expounded letter was accompanied by a drawing of a dark-haired child with its wincing face cocked to the side from the impact of a flying shoe. A friend recalled the book to me years later and we responded with equal parts laughter and loathing at the kind of mentality that would include such a casually violent lesson in what is perhaps the most basic childhood introduction to an intelligible world.
 
History reminds me, however, that Anglo American ways of child rearing were not so idyllic as the TV shows portrayed. In colonial New England, a child’s education went hand in hand with physical discipline. The 1691 edition of The New England Primer for children had ABC lessons that included: “F: The idle FOOL is whipt at school,” and “J: JOB feels the rod, yet blesses God.” And even as the belt-free world of “Father Knows Best” and “Leave It To Beaver” was being beamed into televisions across North America, teachers in schools who looked just like Robert Young and Barbara Billingsley blistered our tender behinds with every device imaginable, from ping pong paddles to a cricket bat perforated in wood shop by one particularly sadistic misanthrope to cut wind resistance.
 
I can at least affirm that I advanced in my ABC’s fairly early in the game – my older brother, not so much. If I say that too frequently I followed a crowd of kids to an afterschool fight only to discover that my brother was one of the young gladiators, you’ll understand what I mean. The same feckless pugnacity repeatedly got him into needless trouble at home, where there was no immunity of non-combatants. K is for Knucklehead.
 
Years later, my mom and stepdad divorced. (My birth father I knew only through an old wedding photograph and mom’s spectacularly imaginative comparisons to our misbehavior.) By then I was married, living at the other end of the country and going to seminary. I did not know the degree to which their split had affected me. Then one evening, after my wife had gone to bed and I stayed up studying, I sank into an abyss of grief, crying and shaking uncontrollably.
 
Gone were the family parties when we kids listened to music and played while our parents did…whatever parents did at parties, until the sensuous Puerto Rican food appeared miraculously on the table to be gobbled up by gangly calorie-burning urchins, leaving the mess to be cleaned up by elves while we slept soundly wherever our bodies happened to land. Gone was the Monorail, and the Matterhorn, It’s A Small World, and the Adventure Thru Inner Space courtesy of Monsanto. Gone Knott’s berry pie. Gone the excursions to Pacific Ocean Park, Redondo Beach, and Newport Dunes, the broiling burgers, the quenching watermelon.
 
Gone the chilly early hours of Christmas when we’d sneak out of our beds to peek at the gift-wrapped silhouettes under the tree and imagine they were what we wanted. Gone a mother’s tender ministrations when any of us kids were sick. Gone her tears when she saw mine after a broken wrist ended high school gymnastics. Gone the rosary prayer circles and sleepless nights when my brother was in hospital with brain tumors. Gone the frantic calling for my sister lost in a Tijuana bazaar. Gone the tears of joy when she was found. Gone the dreaded daily tablespoon of cod liver oil and the sting of Mercurochrome on scraped knees and elbows.
 
Gone dad’s brutal six-day workweek that underwrote our lives. Gone when the family sat around the only television in the house after eating dinner at the same table, at the same time, and the wild symphony of everyone talking at once. Gone the laughter, I’m talking Puerto Rican laughter, the world series of laughter, now only faint bells in the distant steeple of my memory. Z is for Zapatazo.

The Fall of Middle Earth 
 
One day, I went to that land
between home and school, shocked
to find it invaded. The scene
looked like a horde of dragons,
their plated skin clattering,
their movement stuttering
like some Harryhausean nightmare,
and generals commanding troops
in white helmets from blue paper
battle plans. The noise
cracked the sky’s thin blue shell
and soot from organ pipe nostrils
nearly blocked out the running yolk
of the sun. Mandibles dropped open
dripping an earthy stew
then clammed shut with the metallic
squeal of lightning, like colossal
hinges on the gates of Mordor,
maws of these steel-veined horrors
engorging and disgorging
dirt, rocks, grasses, trees,
nests, warrens, dens and cloisters,
secret gardens, fens and shires.
Fangorn, Moria, Rivendell...

How I started hating
   conspiracy theories

                                                                     How often the truth is just not sexy enough.
                                                                     But the lie? Now that’s an orgy.
​
In the fifth grade I caught the flu so bad I missed two weeks of school. When I returned my teacher got down on one knee to look me in the eyes and said: “Ruben, are you OK? I heard you got in trouble with the law and went to juvenile detention.” “Home with the flu,” I said. “Nearly died. Didn’t you get mom’s letter?” “I heard you were really in juvie.” “Nope. Home sick. Nearly died.” He walked away disappointed, in the same way dogs find catching cars disappointing. That year I was “Juvie Rubie,” hang all my protestations for truth. Even today, I’m Juvie Rubie.

I Don’t Mean 
 
I don’t mean to doubt your faith but
             why doesn’t it make you good to me?
 
I don’t mean to question your scriptures
but why are the sweet parts applied to you
and the harsh parts to me?
 
I don’t mean to be aloof but why does god love you
unconditionally but me conditionally?
 
I don’t mean to sound unpatriotic
but why does the god of the universe bless
America over other nations, and before that Rome,
or France, or Germany, or Spain, then England?
 
I don’t mean to risk your wrath but why does god
look and act like the latest rulers?
 
I don’t mean to appear radical but why does god favor
your race over mine?
 
I don’t mean to feel cheated, but why does god answer
your prayers and not mine – when you got the job I didn’t,
and the traffic lights you believe worked for you
made me miss my friend’s last moments?
 
I don’t mean to impugn your justice but why does god love
sinners like you more than sinners like me?
 
I don’t mean to question your motives but why does accepting
your religion put me and mine under you and yours?
 
I don’t mean to sound bitter but why is there no room for me
in the land, the neighborhood, your family, your heart?
 
I don’t mean to dislike your god of grace but why gift
the one truth to you and leave others in damning ignorance?
 
I don’t mean to be impertinent but how come god welcomes
prayer in any language but only English can be spoken here?
 
I don’t mean to be skeptical about the universality
of your religion but why do I have to amputate my culture
but you get to keep yours?
 
I don’t mean to be in your face but why can’t you see me?

I don’t mean to speak so loudly but why can’t you hear me?

I don’t mean to doubt your faith but
            why doesn’t it make you good to me?

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​Ruben Rivera is Emeritus VP for DE&I and Associate Professor of History at Bethel University in Saint Paul, MN. He lives in Minneapolis with his wife Anita. Although his poetry has won awards in various contests, Z is for Zapatazo is Ruben’s first published collection.

little boy toiling in the beet field watching
white people gather for a track meet
toil and soil and summer sweat
rows extending to the end of dreams
melt youthful vigor into
puddles of warm despair
 
across the road they’re gathering
’neath the cover of umbrellas flowering
like tulips blooming in the manicured turf
they’re sitting on nylon camping chairs
’n sipping cold-sweat bottles of Gatorade
pulled from coolers the colors of fire & ice
 
I’m so hot and thirsty tired and dirty
said the little boy to the relentless sun
but we don’t go home until the field is done
while across the road cheers and laughter
and idle chatter waft on breezes carrying
the scents of sunscreen ’n privilege

​The photos above show some of the author's family members. The third photo the author mentions in his description below is the one used at the beginning of the feature.

​In his words: The one of my mom and great aunt Jennie was taken at a migrant worker camp called a "Colonia." The next one is of my Great-Grandmother, the full-blood Yaqui from Mexico; my brother and sister and I called her Amah. Third one is my Great-Uncle and cousin in between members of one of the families who worked the fields with them. Those three were taken in Weld County, Colorado in the early 1940s. The fourth one is my aunt in a beet field taken some time in the 1930s. I included that one because it closely aligns with the poem's opening line even though it's not of a "little boy." They didn't take pictures of themselves working in the fields because once the work started, as the poem says, they don't stop until the field was done.

​Joe Menchaca is an emerging writer of fiction, poetry, and nonfiction with a Master of Arts in Professional Creative Writing from the University of Denver. His poetry can be found in Dissident Voice. Joe’s writing is marked by an unpretentious, gritty, and raw yet lyrical style. Unflinching in his examination of self, literature, and culture, his distilled style reflects a sensitive and perceptive exploration of life. Joe, whose parents were migrant workers that settled in Colorado in the 1920s, was raised on farms in Northern Colorado, and in the summers, he worked hoeing beets and picking crops. According to family oral history, one of Joe’s maternal great-grandmothers was full-blood Yaqui from Mexico, and a paternal great-grandfather was full-blood Cherokee. Joe currently lives in Fort Collins, Colorado with his lovely wife of nearly forty years, and Tiny, their Chihuahua.