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 YOU ARE MY SUNSHINE by Ivan Argüelles so folds the old year its broken diseased leaves its tripartite reconfigurations of an exiled sky its functionless attributes of lungs and bellows days like felled beasts hamstrings cut ears lopped days immersed in prussic acid and forged moon-dust atavistic months trapped in their own circularity unable to mouth their own unpronounceable names nor to rectify the phonetic damage done to their shapes seasons withered by oppositions of gas and distance like mountains collapsing into invisible lakes hemorrhaging light from their invariable wounds speaking like statues in a void no sleep can enter the enormous effigies of history shadowing copies of heroes and nameless saints down corridors and embankments where stricken cities grieve how much was lost in the fiction of calendar time the manipulations of politicians and bankers homophones of the great solar disk turned black ! like the serpent tail in mouth devouring its own being spirit without clouds animus of destroyed wharfs scripts of tattered glyph and cuneiform high and loud in atmospheres poisoned by future shareholders planets and asterisks commas and circumflex accents dizzying spirals hermetic consonants sung on one note vowels redder than the voice of no-beginnings impossibility of medical science to redefine the sound issuing from the late cycle’s numinous accident of birth and now !? and now the inarticulate diapason of darkness the lengthening afternoon without windows or hills the absolute innocence of door-posts and gate-swings paths that lead inward eradicated by technology everyone spying on everyone else using progress to justify the abyss into which uncountable beings fall never to be recovered and memory itself the bereaved ear and eye without meaning in the blank effusion when rock fragment and cliff reassert their primacy how many are the distances denied by this passing minutes and hours thumbs and echelons of ink dissolution of the orient—why move on into the plunge this is not next year but the single and only music to be recorded before electricity fails and doomed spacecraft earth turns to enigmatic azure powders you are my sunshine my only sunshine 12-31-20!  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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 Iconic image by Robert Lentz Rezo a TonantzinBy Rafael Jesús González Tonantzin madre de todo lo que de ti vive, es, habita, mora, está; Madre de todos los dioses las diosas madre de todos nosotros, la nube y el mar la arena y el monte el musgo y el árbol el ácaro y la ballena. Derramando flores haz de mi manto un recuerdo que jamás olvidemos que tú eres único paraíso de nuestro vivir. Bendita eres, cuna de la vida, fosa de la muerte, fuente del deleite, piedra del sufrir. concédenos, madre, justicia, concédenos, madre, la paz. Prayer to TonantzinBy Rafael Jesús González Tonantzin mother of all that of you lives, be, dwells, inhabits, is; Mother of all the gods the goddesses Mother of us all, the cloud & the sea the sand & the mountain the moss & the tree the mite & the whale. Spilling flowers make of my cloak a reminder that we never forget that you are the only paradise of our living. Blessed are you, cradle of life, grave of death, fount of delight, rock of pain. Grant us, mother, justice, grant us, mother, peace.  Rafael Jesús González is an international activist for human rights and social justice, a bilingual poet and writer, Poet Laureate of Berkeley, California, and, always with our deepest appreciation, a frequent contributor to Somos en escrito. © Rafael Jesús González 2020.
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