Inspired by the Moorish horsemen, 
the Castellanos
set out in wooden ships
across an alien sea
with stalls of stallions
treated better than men,
fed and lovingly groomed
for the day they would
dance upon the land
to the music of cruel spurs.
 
The Aztecas had never seen
such a creature
and thought it was an enormous,
sweating stag of which the rider
was a part – a mystical beast
to be feared, and yet the indios
became its master with lazos
and chaparras,
estribos and botas,
and when strays escaped
to the north and multiplied masteñeros gathered
and broke them for the gringos.
 
Alla en el rancho grande,
Grande Julio Mireles
went out with his nine sons
after a pot of café del campamento
and cigarros, huevos rancheros.
 
He taught the Tejanos
his craft, his charros
begat Kings in the fields
claimed by barbed-wire
and rifles (to steal a horse meant hanging), 
and when the dueño learned
all his secrets, vaqueros
gave way to “buckaroos”
with their chaps and lassos,
stirrups and cowboy boots,
mis padientes,
mojados.
 
Robert René Galván
11.6.21

Robert René Galván, born in San Antonio, Texas, resides in New York City where he works as a professional musician and poet. His poetry collections include Meteors (Lux Nova Press), Undesirable – Race and Remembrance (Somos en escrito Literary Foundation Press), and The Shadow of Time (Adelaide Books). His  poems also appear in Puro ChicanX Writers of the 21st Century and various magazines, including Yellow Medicine Review: A Journal of Indigenous Literature, Art and Thought, Adelaide Literary Magazine, Azahares Literary Magazine, Gyroscope, Hawaii Review, Hispanic Culture Review, Newtown Review, Panoply, Somos en escrito Magazine, Stillwater Review, West Texas Literary Review, and UU World. He is a Shortlist Winner Nominee in the 2018 Adelaide Literary Award for Best Poem. Two poems by Galván have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and another for the Best of the Web for 2020.

Marianela Medrano was born and raised in the Dominican Republic and has lived in Connecticut since 1990. A poet and a writer of nonfiction and fiction, she holds a PhD in psychology. Her literary work has appeared in anthologies and magazines in Latin America, Europe and the United States. Her poetry has been translated into Italian and French.  
 
Medrano’s individual publications include: Oficio de Vivir (Buho, 1986), Los Alegres Ojosde la Tristeza (Buho, 1987), Regando Esencias/The Scent of Waiting (Alcance, 1998), Curada de Espantos (Torremozas, 2002), Diosas de la Yuca, (Torremozas, 2011), Prietica (Alfaguara, 2013).  Rooting (Owlfeather Collective, 2017).

Watch her 2015 TedTalk at Ursuline College: 
​https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8pQeBYd2oJk​

                                "Jesucristo Santifícanos"

I can hear the eternal mumbling
Of el Rosario
In the other room.
And I am alone in the living room
With dirty blue walls.
More alone than my first day of School,
Where I sat in the aisles
Looking at a woman
I didn’t understand
‘Cuz she was a gringa
And I am a wetback child.  And I
Hated her and her sick colored skin.
I hated all the kids who didn’t
Know what I was saying.  I hated how
They stood up.  Looked at the Cloth
With bright red and blue and put
Their hands over their hearts.
Mumbled on and on like my Abuelita, when
She runs all the words together
From el Rosario.
 
The gringa’s eyes were full and new.
Not like Your eyes that are
Dying colors.
And You!
You didn’t help me!  And now You’re
Looking at me with those blue eyes
Like all those dumb kids who didn’t know
When I said hello.
You know everything, and theydidn’tknownothing
¡No me mires con esos pinches ojos!
‘Cuz you’re looking at me like
I’m no good
‘Cuz you know my Dad’s a mojado
And I can’t mumble the way they do
When they stand
So tall
To pray

"Red Wine, Roque"

Roque
You taught me
Red wine
Was close to a
Lonely
Morning
Orgasm
 
A poem set on the
Moon.
 
A revolution
Set in my
Soul.

​MARIA J. ESTRADA is an English college professor of Composition, Literature, and her favorite, Creative Writing. She also runs her union chapter with amor and pride. She grew up in the desert outside of Yuma, Arizona in the real Barrio de Los Locos, a barrio comprised of new Mexican immigrants and first-generation Chicanos. Drawing from this setting and experiences, she writes like a loca every minute she can—all while magically balancing her work and union and family obligations. She lives in Chicago’s south side with her wonderfully supportive husband, two remarkable children, and two mischievous cats—one of whom has killed at least one laptop. You can learn more about her writing happenings and favorite books on her YouTube channel Radical Books and Politics.
 
She is Founder and Editor-in-Chief at Barrio Blues Press. 

​Cuando bailan las calacas
y cantan las calaveras
es cuando las recordamos
y las amamos de veras.

                        © Rafael Jesús González 2021            

When the skeletons dance
& the skulls sing
is when we remember them
& love them for real.
​
                © Rafael Jesús González 2021

Rafael Jesús González, Prof. Emeritus of literature and creative writing, was born and raised biculturally/bilingually in El Paso, Texas/Cd. Juárez, Chihuahua, and taught at University of Oregon, Western State College of Colorado, Central Washington State University, University of Texas El Paso (Visiting Professor of Philosophy), and Laney College, Oakland, California where he founded the Dept. of Mexican & Latin-American Studies. Also visual artist, he has exhibited in the Oakland Museum of California, the Mexican Museum of San Francisco, and others in the U.S. and Mexico. Nominated thrice for a Pushcart prize, he was honored by the National Council of Teachers of English and Annenberg CPB for his writing in 2003. In 2013 he received a César E. Chávez Lifetime Award and was honored by the City of Berkeley with a Lifetime Achievement Award at the 13th Annual Berkeley Poetry Festival 2015. He was named the first Poet Laureate of Berkeley in 2017. Visit http://rjgonzalez.blogspot.com/. 

                          i
Brooklyn a park bench a quart bottle of
malt liquor and a brother
how did that happen late spring early death
drone of skies ready to annihilate themselves
an ear wrenched from its rock formation
a buzz of intonations from the Mahatmas
stoned and iridescent in their vanishing
perched like quetzal birds on the telephone wire
high above planet Nothing all comes back
to this moment realization of these deaths
the masks of infancy withering yet beautiful
and Hey ! did you hear the eloquence emanating
from the jazz trumpet of Miles Davis ?
basements in accolades of marijuana smoke
decadence and livelihood waiting for births
for nomenclatures to disclose their irate vowels
in a backyard next door to Betty Carter
mind soaked in tequila playing boyhood one
Last Time and it all falls down the sudden repetition
of a life experience the onset of seizures
the rest of breath reduced to a red parenthesis
inside which the conflagration of ideas and love
recycled eerie representations of store windows
masked and hooded figures demons alluring
and baleful and after that what is there to know
a trip to the outback a dozen hospitalizations
mysterious tumors ventilators bad x-rays
memories of Mayo Clinic cold spells
long periods before and after that no one remembers
but for the poignant high notes the small echo
in its shell and the massive but absent seas
 
                            ii
the little red clarinet case pushed under the bed
sheets wrung out turning yellow from ichor of the gods
transpiration and head-wounds tilted off the moving
wagon on to the sidewalks of inferno and whatever
could that mean the isolation wards and always
the stranger at the door bare-knuckled with a bag
to capture whatever malignant spirits trying to escape
the maps were drawn tight around the peninsula and
causeways and trampolines for the kids to jump
up and down inside the coma where an excised cosmos
auto-destructs with all its plastic passengers
most of whom have traveled to the Yucatan and
harbored nights in Teotihuacan with vessels of ether
the countdown hasn’t even started before the finish
is a fait accompli the forlorn hills of dialect and
twilight the way they reappear in dreams half-beings
bereft of intellect and side-swiped by planetary diesels
plunging like headless horsemen down the Pan-Am Highway
motels and endless waiting rooms dismantled telephones
ambulances and more ambulances the wrong address
and finality of sliding curtains hanging like angels
left to dry from the wars and the doctors of hypnosis
and mercury just staring into the abyss devoid
of language the cuneiform of their brains working
overtime to excuse themselves from all culpability
and soon it’s another Halloween trick or treating
on the doorsteps of a missing basement and phantom
music ascends The Monster Mash with calaveras de
azúcar and the jingles and marionettes of memory
dancing sing-song in the cavities
I got the shakes I’m going fast
 
                           iii
cada día es el día de los muertos
 
11-01-21

​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.