No Me Quieren Escuchar
​
I run around with my insides in my hands 
taking them to you, to him, to them.
No one knows what to do,
so you all watch
as I stuff them back in
and conceal them with a cloth.
All is well
even though the blood drips out.
You can ignore it,
just mop it up y ya se esconde.
Todo está bien,
no mal,
just bien.
Hay que seguir aguantando
the pain.
Porque él se fue
sin tí, sin mí
corriendo del dolor de aquí.

​They Move On

I want him remembered,
not forgotten.
But, I’m not allowed to grieve.
Obscurity, sadness, pain
is what everyone sees.
Uncomfortable, intolerable,
 so they don’t speak.
As if erasing him erases the pain.
Now that he is gone the pain is gone.
Life goes on.
All is well.
Package it up with a neat little bow,
and away it goes.
Away from you.
He lives in me.
It’s hard for you to understand.
So, we pretend that you don’t see,
the sadness living in me.
See, you walked away from him
long before he walked away from me. 

Lo Que Dejo

Will I ever feel safe again?
Did I ever feel safe before?
No yo creo que no,
el alcohol siempre tuvo el control.
Querían descansar
de él, y no saber más.
 
Pero ya se fue, ya no está,
y en el vacío no podrán descansar.
O alomejor sí, pero yo no.
Yo siempre lo espere ver mejor.
Que algún día ya no iba tomar
y ya nomás sería buen papá.   
 
El, todos, yo, nomás ocupábamos amor,
pero nos dejamos llevar por el dolor.
Se nos olvidó, que para sanar el dolor
nomás ocupamos demostrar más amor.
Es fácil tenerles compasión a las personas buenas,
pero la compasión también es para las personas enfermas. 

Never Coming Back

A little girl looks to her dad for strength,
the rock that keeps things in their place.
I never knew how safe I felt
until I went one day without
the strongest man I ever knew
the funniest one too.
But he is gone, and this I know:
I have never felt this much alone.

Lupita Velasco was born in Calvillo, Aguascalientes, Mexico; but grew up as an undocumented immigrant in Oklahoma. As a sheltered immigrant, Lupita found comfort, adventure, and refuge in literature from a very young age. Reading is Lupita’s favorite escape and writing her favorite form of expression. Lupita graduated from the University of Oklahoma in 2011 with a bachelor’s in International Studies and a minor in Criminology. Lupita currently lives in Bethany, Oklahoma with her neurodivergent husband, two daughters, and four chickens.

José E. Valdivia Heredia is an undergraduate student of Religion and Latin American studies at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania. They are a Chicanx writer from Northern California born to two parents from Michoacán, México. José has published a short poem in the Harvard Latinx literary publication Palabritas. 

XIBALBÁ
 
seeing a head hanging in a tree
they asked which is the Way
it replied and said use the feminine
plural for whatever you encounter
first is the House of jaguars infinite
followed by the cold that precedes
and supersedes space and time
then the House of bats eternal
and the world ruled by centipedes
no book is safe no knowledge sure
they wandered up and down
black and green and white and red
growing up the twins of Xibalbá
from the east they took the mountain
that dwells beneath the sea and set
it on its peak in the west of never-be
great clouds of reddish dust swarmed
north and south but the only path
they ever found was the route infernal
into earth’s seething bowels of smoke
they went playing ball with skulls
of discarded gods and learned
to speak in Spanish and court royalty
from afar and as knights from some
strange tale of yore they sported
with conquistadors and landlords
and built cities overnight that
stretched from lake to lake and
sank within a week its pyramids
and ocelots and incense altars loud
all vanished but for the hieroglyphs
that narrated in literature’s fac-simile
the true story of the rising solar vowel
in innocence and betrayal and deaths
as countless as the stars that swirl
unseen by the denizens of Xibalbá
and of the moon’s twenty-eight mansions
each an error of motion and sound
and of other celestial bodies and
cigarettes and stairways the twins
repeated in their unaccounted births
will come a day they will return
to the tree of the hanging head
to enquire again which is the Way
& set forth once more to Xibalbá
 
06-15-21

YESTERDAY
 
there were profanities and jingles the ruckus
and confabulation of the origins when gods
no larger than saliva or ink demand form and shape
the arms and excrescences of salt and helmets
the full panoply of the demons lurking behind
the cherry or poplar and the hills growing slow
but dense with sounds and commas and asterisks
speech was an impediment and the size of clouds
thunder rumbling and toxic in the shells where
nymphs take birth and hair and legends of opium
darker and stress of nightfall unexpected charms
the ululation behind the groves spark and tissue
will resignation and salvation ever be the same ?
somewhere the myth of time and the lesser entities
the moon plunging out of a comb or threads knotted
and the slender graceful waist of the woman whose
backside is missing or it is a lunation a shining
from afar when distance is only an echo the syllable
of a leaf  shaking in the tiny fragrance of sleep
what it is to dream that there is no beginning
only the surfeit and promise of death the marvel
and to learn to read before the hour is up and signs
written in erasable red and fictions tales of demigods
beings who stalk the backlands and ivy thick and
humid the steaming iridescence of the newest sky
can you remember a day when there was no light ?
 
06-12-21

​​Ivan Argüelles is a Mexican-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.