Edward Vidaurre’s writings have appeared or are forthcoming in The New York Times Magazine, The Texas Observer, Grist, Poet Lore, The Acentos Review, Poetrybay, Voices de la Luna, and other journals and anthologies. Vidaurre has been a judge for submissions for the Houston Poetry Festival, editor for the Rio Grande Valley International Poetry Festival anthology Boundless 2020, and editor of Cutthroat, a journal of the arts. He is the author of seven collections of poetry, and is the 2018-2019 City of McAllen, Texas Poet Laureate. He is a four-time Pushcart Prize-nominated poet and publisher of FlowerSong Press, and its sister imprint Juventud Press. Vidaurre is from Boyle Heights, California and now resides in McAllen, Texas with his wife and daughter.

TAMAZUNCHALE
 
antes de abrir la demencia para descubrir
palabra tras palabra que no tiene sentido
diccionario de pulmones ! pulgas y rascacielos !
para mejor comprender lo que pasa dentro del ladrillo rojo
al margen de la calle que nos lleva al sur donde
los muertos tratan de olvidar lo que pasó ayer
cuando la gran máquina de nubes y sonidos
se acostó al lado del mar que sufre tantas camas
inexplicables y sin eco y ahora dime que quieres
con tus ojos apagados y tu mente como sirena
de ulises llamando a todos los náufragos
que la ambulancia está lista a partir !
ya me voy  hacia la mejor tortillera que hay
para besarla en su coma de vidas paralelas
y entonces con una tristeza mundial
seguiré caminando un brazo mas famoso que el otro
una oreja de piedra y otra en ninguna parte
para qué poner en dos el uno ?
multiplicar significa morir !
 
07-21-20​

TEOCALLI
    for Joe who appeared  yesterday morning
for a fraction of an instant in the doorway
 
standing in the light of the morning sun
confused with radiance and dazzling
the stanzas of an unwritten poem shift
in the monumental distances of air
crane-feathered shafts rotate like minds
ablaze in the pyramidal distances of sky
stone built on stone stepping to heaven
solar flares like tongues speaking loud
the destructions of cloud and thunder
and ever deeper the effects of amnesia
rain drowning cities of fine dust citadels
of bone and tumult havoc of wheels
spun out of control bringing down all
ten directions and mountains reared
overnight to mark off the western margin
where the archaic sea darkens rushing
to mirror itself in a dream of feathers
and the twins up and down they go
tracing each periphery of rock and grass
measuring how far it is to the lunar aleph
fading like dissolved aspirin at dawn
what fills the ear at such an early hour
if not the Sanskrit parrot reciting
chronologies and adamantine dynasties
names none can rightly recall inscribed
on the reverse of coins or obliterated
by a mere thumb on porous sandstone
libraries ! the tomb of words and to speak
the labyrinthine dialects communing
with deities of the Unseen and Unheard
pages torn at random from the codex
depicting the origins of divine Chaos
night ! splendors of ink in canyons
where the dead revive use of their hands
such a morning atop the great Teocalli
converting sums of air into breathless voice
hail all the heights and renown of fire !
we have come down the Panamerican
visiting each of the summers of 1953
and talking backwards to mummified
relatives wrapped in serapes of liquid gold
we will never reach tomorrow for sure
the Nymph death will take one of us
before the prophesy can be fulfilled
every day is this single bright moment
standing like phantom pharaohs immobile
in the pellucid movie film of memory
you are me and I am you ! there is grass
and maps strewn all over the lawn
and avenues that stretch as far back as
the first city carved out of the womb
ten minutes apart the matching Teocallis
that cast no shadow only black light !
 
06-11-20

NICOLE NOEL HENARES

THE POET: A PERSONAL NARRATIVE

​I was born in the Monterey peninsula, California, in August, 1974. I proudly share the same birth date as the great labor activist and guerrillera cultural, Luisa Moreno, who organized the women of the Congress of Industrial Organizations, my grandmother’s labor union.
 
My grandparents and their families were members of the immigrant communities who worked on Cannery Row between the 1920’s and 1930’s in the Monterey Bay Area, California. After the collapse of the sardine canning eras in the 1950’s, my grandfather taught himself carpentry. Although it took him three times to pass the test, he became a general contractor. He was very proud of achieving his goal, as he did so without having any formal education.
 
All my cousins and I celebrated our birthdays at the Carousel in the old Edgewater Packing Company on Cannery Row. My fascination with Cannery Row and my family history began then.
 
I started school when I was five years old. I went to Marina Del Mar elementary school. Marina del Mar was a bedroom community of Fort Ord, the largest military base on the west Coast at that time. My mother was a teacher at the school I attended, and piloted one of the first multicultural education curriculums in the country under the tutelage of Dr. Charlie Knight, the first black superintendent of Monterey Peninsula Unified School District.
 
I read a poem when I was five years old. It was about strawberries and fairies. I felt inspired by the fairy book of poems I read then. But I didn’t write my first poem until I was seven. Every time I wrote poems I felt exalted. At the time, I wrote about many other subjects. But I loved writing about fairies. I was really into fairies.
 
I attended a predominantly white high school, in the city of Carmel, located near the city of Monterey. My high school English teacher was Ms. Gilbert--who is now Señora Quintanilla. It was in her classes, during my sophomore year, that we started discussing themes of race and gender. She had us reading everything from Chaim Potok to Lorraine Hansberry and Ray Bradbury. My favorite subjects were English, History and, French. I’m ashamed to admit that I took French and not Spanish to spite my father, because he used to tease me so much, telling me that I spoke Spanish like a gringa.
 
I was very shy around boys and didn’t feel safe around them until I was in high school. But I did have a lot of friends who helped me get through my freshman year. When I was in the ninth grade I was lucky to be mentored by a Latina student who was a senior. She advised me not to compare myself to the white girls. To be myself. She is now Dr. Lauren Padilla-Valverte, the head of the California Community Foundation.
 
The most memorable event in my life before age 18 was playing the Vivaldi violin concerto at the Spring Concert in 1989, my sophomore year, and getting straight A’s except for a B in math. I hated Math. I was 14.
 
Along with a B in Math, I got a D- in Health because pretended to sleep during Sex ED.  I was very uncomfortable in that class - I'm a survivor of early childhood sexual abuse.  In high school my friends and I were being groomed and molested by an older man we knew at the skating rink. Many of my girlfriends at that time were also victims of what we would call now intimate partner violence. It all bothered me. I didn't know how to talk about anything so I pretended to sleep.  The teacher threw erasers at me, but ended up telling my mom I was a "good kid" he just didn't understand what was wrong. Even in my poems from that time, I chose to focus on the resilience within love and connection for the world around me, rather than the pain. However, to fully understand our resilience the trauma it comes from needs to be acknowledged.

THE POETRY

They say the fourth plane that morning
             was heading here:
 
5pm
 
Lonely brass frog statues
            and armed barricades
surround the Trans-America Pyramid,
            glowing up Columbus Avenue
to lime and cherry chipped neon
            where strip club barkers idle:
Tonight, only the regular horny wander in,
            a hunchbacked
            Cornell educated former engineer,
            now poet, with rainbow suspenders,
            a skin condition, and Mork from Ork hair,
needing some semblance of normalcy
            in a stripper named Scout.
           
            Faithful restaurants
hesitantly remain open but empty;
            rows of tables,
            garlic,
            pannini,
            and chianti wait
            for customers
            who never come.
 
7pm
 
The streets are still,
            like Easter morning,
except, instead of church
            the people hide in the temple
of FOX, CNN, and ABC news, 
            praying the dead find resurrection
while polychromatic screens synthesize
            background music, instant replays
and red blocked letters           
 
AMERICA UNDER ATTACK.
 
In the bar with the photos
            of naked, now dead,
beat poets holding peace signs
            & flowers, a gaggle of workers
from the financial district
            dissolve around the television
that hovers morning into night.
            One stockbroker, his hair a perfect wave,
who says his friends worked in the Towers,
            loudly slurs through curled lips,
“I hope we bomb them, bomb them all,
            even the young, before they’re old enough to kill..”  
The bartender shaky with white knuckles,
            wants to reply
but the day has been slow
            and she needs the tip.
 
9:30 pm
In another bar, one of the only 
            in North Beach without a television,
an overly hormonal tranny torch singer,
            an English teacher,
and a piano player named Sam-I-Am
            share a basket of Danish cheese and crackers,
while arguing over the spelling of
            Afghanistan and the logic that Grendel
killed the Danes just because he was “evil”.
            They wait for  James, 
            who’s full of  Wizard of Oz
            masonic conspiracy theories,
complaints about backwards baseball caps
            and the price of hot-dogs,
to  hear what he’s gonna say.
 
11pm
Wearing wrinkled pinstripes,
            two young blues musicians
play guitar in an alley
            with Lightnin’ Hopkins’ vengeance- 
They never say a word
            about the tempo, terrorists,
or vapid late summer night.
            If John Lee Hooker’s
holy Crawlin’ Kingsnake,
            or a big legged woman
slithered next to them
            they’d only butter
from 12  to 7 bar blues.
            One of them has suffered heroin,
baby mama drama, and recently five days
            in the drunk tank.
The other, on vacation from Finland,
            has lost his wallet, passport,
            and two guitars
            in three months.  
Every blues is their blues;
            through the night in doorways
with purple and green mardi gras beads,
            lousy tarps and bottles of Hennessey
to keep them warm.

2004



Thou Mayest
 
THIS IS THE BREAD OF THE CHOSEN
THIS IS THE FOOD OF THE ACCURSED
 
we are a culture of beernuts/
fox sports/ major league/ too much/
shopping/ when the going gets rough/
 towers are bombed/
the tough are encouraged/ to consume/
Keep America Open For Business/
one night stands and three marriages
moralistic lies /a smoke and mirrors of values
and greed/ spooning chainsaws jetskies NASCAR
gasoline/ racing /
buy one pie get the second for free
 
we are a nation of flatulence
go team go
faster bigger MORE
where the package is more interesting than the toy
 
it’s a cataclysm of the heart
a wanton sickness
cheap words and extravagant catcalls
placing me head first
into the bellies of vases/legs flying out/
heart shaped orchid exposed/ only for/
a copulating squawk
 
as the coin twists in the air
the shock of the bourgeoisie/
the self proclaimed café hip/ just another
commodity for sale/ thinking poetry
is bread of the enlightened/ the chosen
so smug in hip righteousness/words
pockmarked in cheap jewels & artificial fruity
blossoms
 
this is the food of the accursed/ the morsels of the
damned/
the kernels of those/ who are nothing/
but a statistic to throw around in coffee shops/
a girl who has seen more death at sixteen/ than
anyone should/
she told me she couldn’t even recognize his face
because it was so covered in blood
when he was shot after school on the 29 MUNI
and she lives here/ in this city/ in our backyard
 
the slaughter  continues
/another kid in a coffin we’re not allowed to see/
another imprisoned /headlines just hyper-reality
television/
while others like them fight and torture in foreign
lands
 
and in our glittering high-rises
the twins dance tangerine waltzes /acerbic hipsters
syncopate f# on the half note/sip pinot grigio spritzers/
sway with venetian glass eggs up their stoned asses/
point that’s so bourgeois / in between
troubled time signatures/ and watery coughs from
next-door
 
yet it is the same melancholic tune at 2 am/ babies in
cradles of filth/
momma just a baby raised by the television/
 
so
come and see
come and see
 
DO YOU SEE
 
I am a deformation for the cursed
 
I snore variations composed on laughter   
with my cape on and kitchen utensil corsage
dirging sonorous nonsense / as a meal
 
my mouth is filled with muddied jellied flowers
juggling soured waters
pustulled clocks gnawing on the husks of time
 
between my black sounds
/the death among the bougainvillea/
live giant balloons/ and hummingbird springs
pale stalks of corn /blackberries/ without brambles/
snapped open fuchsia blossoms
/releasing nectar for the bleeding
 
while the arrogant wear their spoils
I swallow poetry
                as a prayer

2004



The Dance Of The Urban Honeybee
 for Ric Masten
 I needed to mail a letter
 so I go to my corner Walgreen’s
 and purchase 4 stamps for $1.99...
 Later, when the 48 cent difference occurs to me,
 I wonder if I paid extra
 for the red cursive emblemed cardboard
 and plastic wrapping,
or convenience?
 
 Yesterday I saw a man yell
 at hotel strikers-
 workers of less than $10/hour, locked out
 for demanding health benefits.
The man said the strikers made too much noise"
"Shut the fuck up!"
"Shut the fuck up!"
 
 They call me teacher, poet, guide;
 the honeybee sent out to find a new destination
 where the hive can find safety.
 
 Yet, I'm finding no answers;
my students think I'm crazy,
 too tough of a grader,
 there's a hole in the ceiling of my classroom,
and the heater doesn't work.
 
On the streets, panhandlers stand on their heads
 next to marquis that say, "All you could ever want to eat".
 While, Bitsey, the heroin addict midget prostitute
 crutches across Market Street
 her freshly amputated left stump
 swinging in rhythm
 with the swoosh of traffic.
 And what's most sad is that it is all so familiar.
 
So I dance my hallucinatory jig that's supposed to tell,
"this is where we go from here"
 to a vacant hive of
 no answers just
 a solitary moan of panicked despair.

2004



The Downcast Dreamer
 
Tonight in this limpid ball it's just me
and the alleyway mourning doves
saying to hell with it all.
 
I surround myself in miniature
ornamental beauty
because it’s easier to live
in the watery glitter of a snow-globe
than search for the ineffable
in the perfume of the city’s
rust and dream
white laced with sorrow
and the ash of rage.
 
I'm turning mermaid and a bit sea-witch,
my heart with the sexless ocean,
shiny hard and gaudy,
while the doves get drunk like pigeons
and hoot tintinnabulations of angels
and soundless blessings
to empty arms.

2005


 
Comfort Of The Dead
I dreamt of the dead last night, for the second time this week.
It was a most rare vision, perhaps past the wit of man to say what dream it was.
We were at a play that was being performed
            in a big auditorium with red, white and blue seats.
He had arrived early.
He wasn’t high, he didn’t even have a beer with him.
He had arrived early, and was waiting for me. He even saved me a seat.
The show was sold out. It was a performance of Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice - 
(Once upon a time, he ground scored an entire pocket book collection of Shakespeare for me                        because he knew that I loved Shakespeare.)
I was running late, in self pity and despair.
Then the realization set in-
Yes, our country had elected a president,
but he was still alive.
He never had died.
He was alive and he was waiting for me in an auditorium
where we were going to watch a performance of A Merchant of Venice.
Some of my students were in the lobby handing out programs.
I panicked to find my seat. He wasn’t angry, he held my hand
and whispered in my ear that of course he would hold a seat for me, 
he would always hold a seat for me.
He said all that he said when he was alive-
That his white last name did not matter,
he would always be proud of his brown skin.
It did not matter what the historians could or could not dig up,
his family had been here since before there were borders,
before this was even a state, and was just a place with a made up name.
“First we were generals and governors, then we were bad hombres:
All that glitters isn’t gold, the quality of our mercy is very fucking strained,
                        and why shouldn’t it be?”
The only thing that had changed,
was that he no longer said anything about his punk rock nihilism,
or wanting to watch the world burn.
The only thing he said he wanted to do was watch that play.
And as the curtain rose, he whispered,
“The poem’s the thing to love for eternity.” 
 
 2016
 


Then And Now
 
“If the problem with PTSD is disassociation the goal of treatment would be association- integrating the cut off elements of the trauma into the ongoing narrative of life, so that the brain can recognize that ‘that was then, and this is now.’” BESSEL VAN DER KOLK
 
Now that I have remembered I can never forget
            the tick of your heart against my cheek         
in cold and time travel and fog.
 
your caution knew me and hung in my mouth.
You were in trouble, needed to leave,
            but wanted to say,
            I didn’t need to marry a poet to be a poet
confessions stitched my griefs into silence.
            I knew you too.
 
You were water and mirror
            my body remembers in rhythms
and strange dreams haunt me.
            Dreams of the dead and regret
                                    when I am sitting in a vat of truth
addicted to the taste of illusion and shadow,
my greedy skin like dragon scales
all sense of myself
 made no sense.
             So I scratched and scratched
until my fingernails dug beyond flesh, beyond longing,
until there was nothing left but blood and bone,
and the stubbed beginnings
            of great green feathers.
 
Happiness is more than earthly delights.
(There is only so much sadness allowed.)
            The poems synthesize,
enter a temple of prayer.
My words tell me things:
Conjoin clever rhymes
            find coyness within symbols 
 that never dissolve like eighth notes carved into mountains.
Chimeras are imperishable and can mother beauty.
Forget the intoxication of anger and fear and rot
Now is winter in my kitchen.
Now is earth and my ear pressed to chest after washed dishes,
 thank you falls from lips. 
            Now is spring and cusp,
bending down onto knees and teasing 
            my cat with a bright pink feather attached to a stick.
Now is entwined fingers
                        speeding along the blur of blacks and golds
on a nighttime bridge of lights
            amid pandemic and awakening.
  
 
​
EL POEMA es la erección del ahorcado. Demasiado tarde y para nadie. Pero ahí.

-David Eloy Rodriguez

 I Will Wear Yellow

Te quiero,
entiendes?
 
I will wear yellow.
 
Estas palabras son las palabras
de mi sangre,
y mi alma,
entiendes?  
 
No entiendo como
tú eres como eres.
 
No entiendo nada,
ni el por qué devoras mi corazón,
mi cuerpo, mi cabeza, y mis ojos.
 
No entiendo nada,
sólo que te quiero.
 
No entiendo nada más. Te quiero.
 
I will wear yellow because
I am always trying to find light.
Every night the sunset echoes from behind the trees.
 
I remain a heart
in the green of mourning.
But I will wear yellow.
 
Tonight I am with the waning moon
who hovers
over the world
with her ever changing face.
I have listened closely to the secrets
the past has told.
Don’t worry so much about the future-
only the differences
between intention and expectation.
The oranges are beginning
to appear again,
and in May the jacaranda
will bloom electric and purple.
There is always the possibility of starvation
and catastrophe and ego and war,
but, even then,
there is the humble magic
of licorice
and I know how to find it.
 
Sometimes I hear pointing,
accusatory silences, and the sunset continues
to cry louder and louder with the click of time.
I will wear brass hoops around my ears and around my wrists.
I will fall into water.
I will wear yellow.
All lovebirds are mourning doves.
They know my sorrow, like you know my sorrow,
and have poured salt and pepper into these wounds,
 
reminding me to look for light
as my words turn into the echoes
of ragged claws scuttling
across the ocean floor,
and I dress my heart in yellow.
 
 2020

******

LC: Nicole, did you live in San Francisco’s North Beach at the time you wrote these poems? When? Why?
 
NNH: From 2001-2013 I lived in Lower Nob Hill about a fifteen minute walk from near North Beach. I gravitated to that neighborhood because of its history with the Beats.
 
LC: How were those years different from your life in Monterey and your painful experiences in Carmel as you were growing up?
 
NNH: In 2001, after 9-11, everything was surreal in the ways it wasn’t surreal. In August 2001 one of my closest friends had OD’d on heroin and had to be identified by his dental records. Two months after 9-11, my godbrother was killed in a drug related murder.  There was something  familiar about all the chaos. It was easier to make sense out of the political chaos than my personal chaos, but I realize how much both were interconnected. In 2001 I started keeping a notebook again because I had moved to San Francisco to teach and to write. But I had always been writing intermittently throughout my life and expressed political views. I started keeping a diary in 1981 when I was five years old. My first diary entry was, “The hostages were released today, poor Jimmy Carter.”

​Gritaba en octubre
también fuñía y fuñía
en los siguientes
meses, sin parar un día.
 
¿Qué dice? ¿Qué idioma es ese?
¿Será italiano? ¿Qué es?
¿Es que así hablan los gatos?
 
Saltaba en el charco; saltaba en diciembre.
Brincaba en noviembre y octubre. Brincaba por meses.
Con los ojos hurtados de un gato, los zapatos rojos.
La mochila pequeña, el abrigo corto.
 
¡Qué sonrisa! ¿corría?
Lloraba; reía. Apenas hablando aquel idioma tosco.
Mirando siempre a cada lado de la calle
Con sus ojitos de gato.
 
¿Cuándo fue que creciste tanto?
¿Dónde está el bebé con los ojos de gato?
¿Se habrá ido?
No lo veo más a diario.
Es que espero que esté bien; hablando más de espacio.
Observando al mundo con sus ojos de gato. 

Ana Deniz Sutton-Ventura is an educator, emerging self-taught visual artist and writer from the Dominican Republic. She began her journey at Hostos CC, where she published one of her short stories called “El rabo del puerco,” at ¡ESCRIBA! a Bilingual Journal of Student Art and Writing. Later on she transferred to Hunter College, where she earned her BA in Spanish Literature and a concentration in Africana Studies. She has taught English in El Escorial, Spain and she is currently teaching Spanish in The Bronx. Ana Deniz is also earning her Masters in Adolescent Spanish Education at The City College of New York. This is her first poem for Somos en escrito.
 
Art and Literature blog: https://caribeixa.blogspot.com/

May 28, 2016. 5:20 A.M. 2500 members of the public forces entered the area.
What they found: 130 underage sexual workers, 508 homeless people,
56 slot machines, 1000 “bazuco” doses, 1 kidnapped victim behind a false wall.
 
Two alleys in between a police command,
a military garrison and a church, L-shaped:
to the right, there was a clandestine market of stolen
objects, to the left, taquilleros that trafficked
one dose of bazuco for 2000 pesos--
queues of dried mouths and fidgeting thumbs. They sold
 
20 doses per minute, 8 taquillas sold
460 million pesos’ worth. They would command
the homeless to smuggle sacks of 2000-peso
bills out on their mules. Every day was shaped
by weed rolls and bazuco bags. They trafficked
cocaine residues cooked in red gasoline, stolen
 
bone and brick dust. Lives were stolen:
“The vicio does not spare anyone,” they sold
the promise of a lawless paradise, trafficked
the cheapest drugs. Influence would command
even the wide-eyed rich to trade their steel-shaped
watches for a night in an olla—4000 pesos
 
for a consumption safehouse—a few pesos
for a prostitute. “El bazuco had stolen
the glow in her eyes and her crystal-shaped
shoes when I fell for her. She was sold
to a taquillero three weeks after her first command--
she lost her teeth but never her beauty. They trafficked
 
her body.” Through tunnels, they trafficked
victims underground--sapos who were worth in pesos
less than the bullets they shot. Taquilleros’ commands
for imprisonment in “torture houses” had stolen
their limbs and their poisoned blood. They sold
their remains to be cremated and confined to pill-shaped
 
bazuco powder. Sometimes the devils in L-shaped
Bronx would hide the vice they trafficked--
the souls they lured—the death they sold--
for annual inspections. But with a few pesos,
they bribed their way into the streets they had stolen
to confuse the press and evade the police commands.
 
In 2016 public defense authorities dismantled the area.
They hope to build a Cultural District for the city’s people
by 2023, on top of blood-stained demolished walls.


Glossary:
bazuco,  illegal narcotic substance made from cocaine residue.
taquilleros, operators of points of drug sale within el bronx known as “taquillas.”                                                                                                                
vicio, refers to the addiction caused by bazuco.
sapos, translates literally to “frog,” figuratively to “snitch.”

Laurisa Sastoque, born in Bogotá, Colombia, is a creative writing student at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, where she lives. Due to the Covid-19 situation, she is living in Colombia. “El Bronx, Bogotá D.C” is based on an area in Bogotá, Colombia known as El Bronx.​​