by David Estringel

Después de la estela
 
Yellow wallpaper
peels
behind faded pictures
in dusty frames,
falling to the floor
in ashen drifts—ephemeral--
of births and wakes,
stabbing
to the heart
like first kisses
or cold sips
of Mexican Coke
but dulled
from memory
(and time)
like giftless Christmases
and old housedresses,
drying on the line.
What ghosts roam these halls,
Haunting bowls
of waxed fruit
and glass doorknobs,
lingering ‘round saints’ alters,
dust bunnies,
and jelly jar glasses
like palls
or the bitter of burnt almonds.
As a pale pink echo
of rose
peeks through the air’s must,
a voice whispers, “Recuerdas esto, ahora,”
leaving me to chuckle and smile.
 
How silly it is to mourn life as we live it.

Caja de memoria
 
Fingers,
gingerly sifting
through ecos de lavanda,
praise spirits
of modest treasures
in silent prayer.
Ribbon-tied letters.
A lock of hair tied with blue ribbon.
Viejos dólares de plata.
Tarjetas de oración a los santos (two for St. Jude).
Pressed flowers in wax paper.
A faded scapular.
Old report cards (Never was any good at Math).
Broken reading glasses.
Una camelia encerada
and
the smell of her.
Amén.

David Estringel is a Xicanx writer/poet with works published in literary publications, such as The Opiate, Azahares, Cephalorpress, Lahar, Poetry Ni, DREICH, Rigorous, Somos En escrito, Hispanecdotes, Ethel, The Milk House, Beir Bua Journal, and The Blue Nib. David received his BA in English at the University of Texas at Brownsville and his MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley. Currently, he is a working on his PhD in English (World Literature) and a Graduate Instructor of Composition at Texas A&M-Commerce. His first collection of poetry and short fiction Indelible Fingerprints was published in April 2019, followed his second and third poetry collections Blood Honey and Cold Comfort House in 2022. David has written four poetry chapbooks, Punctures (2019), PeripherieS (2020), Eating Pears on the Rooftop (2022), and Golden Calves (coming March 2023). His new book of micro poetry little punctures, a collaboration with UK illustrator, Luca Bowles, will be released in December 2022. Connect with David on Twitter @The_Booky_Man and his website www.davidaestringel.com.

Listen to David A. Romero read "The Redemption of Roxy Salgado" (text below).

“This seatbelt
Is suffocating
The walls
They’re closing in!”
 
These were the words of one Roxy Salgado
From Rowland Heights, CA
Psychology student at UCLA
Before she unclicked her seatbelt
And opened her car door to the 10 Westbound
Psilocybin was pulsing through her veins
A whole bag of magic mushrooms churning in her stomach
Against the advice of members of her cohort
Three of them in that car
Couldn’t manage to calm her down
Prevent her from tumbling out
Somersaults and side rolls
As her body went limp into the wind
The black pavement under the night’s sky
Illuminated by post lights.
 
It wasn’t Roxy’s obituary
In the following morning’s paper
But that of
Patricia Guzman
Mother of three
Resident of Pico Union, Los Angeles
Hailing from San Miguel, El Salvador
Severe trauma to her neck and spine
Blunt force trauma to her brain
From collision with dashboard
An airbag that never deployed
According to her husband Victor
Her last words were,
“Me duele”
“It hurts”
And fragmented questions
About the safety of their children.
 
Roxy awoke at a friend’s house in Southeast Los Angeles
With a headache
Sprained ankle
Some cuts and bruises
Unanswered texts and voicemails
Clothes embedded with gravel
And stained with blood and vomit.
 
Three months later
Roxy is in a state between uppers and downers
Leaning on a chain-link fence
Across the street from a house in Pico Union, Los Angeles
It is once again nighttime
Roxy looks in through partially open windows
Revealing the Guzman family inside
Victor and his three children
There is laughter
There is screaming
There are long silences and muffled whimpers
Victor often walks around aimlessly
Moves to start something
And abruptly stops
The youngest of the three
Lusita
Has a Dora the Explorer doll
Sometimes she talks to it
Clutches it tightly for hours
Crouched in the same spot.
 
One month later
It is the eve of Lusita’s birthday
Roxy has gathered that from outside surveillance
Roxy’s parents
Have no idea she has functionally dropped out of school
Roxy spends most of her days visiting friends and dealers
Going to parties
Kickbacks
Afternoon hangs
Walking the lampposts and pavements of Los Angeles
But every trip eventually takes her back to the Guzmans
On one walk
Roxy found a discarded piñata on a curb
An unlicensed paper mâché and chicken wire
Dora the Explorer
That day Roxy picked it up
Took it with her on the bus and dragged it home
Fashioned it into a costume.
 
Roxy stands now
In the Guzman’s kitchen with it on
After having broken in
Her mind is swimming
With guilt and hope
The pain of something that happened to her long ago
The little girl Lusita
Walks into the room
Sees Roxy
As a shadowed paper mâché monster
And screams
Roxy lifts her costumed hands
To try and comfort Lusita
She wants to hold her for hours
Tell her everything will be ok
Lusita runs away
Continues screaming
Roxy hears rustling in other rooms
Victor shouts,
“¿Qué es eso?”
Roxy panics
Tears the paper mâché head off
Sprints through the kitchen door
Through an alley
A block over
Roxy can still hear Lusita’s terrified wailing
Roxy is panting and sweating
She leans on a fence still partially covered
In the collapsing costume
She weeps
As the neighborhood dogs
Awaken the neighborhood
One snaps behind her
Teeth colliding with the fence
Roxy runs
Eventually finding her way home.
 
Roxy never returns to the Guzmans’
She goes back to attending classes
Asks for extra credit
Graduates
And in time
Finds a job
On her best days
She forgets what happened
On her worst
She drinks
Pops pills
Starts doing something
And abruptly stops
Or sits for hours
In the same spot.
 
The Guzmans struggle with the loss of Patricia
For many years longer
Lusita occasionally awakens with nightmares
Of a paper mâché monster in the house
But in time
The nightmares abate.
 
Victor
Keeps a copy of the paper
On his antique wooden nightstand
With the article about what happened the night Patricia died
And within it
It outlines how Victor
Swerved into the shoulder of the freeway
To avoid a head-on collision
With a truck heading the wrong direction
There is a statement
Issued by the trucking company
Giving their most sincere condolences
Promising the immediate termination of the driver
And in the cold calculations of the value of Patricia’s life
The announcement of a settlement.
 
Nowhere in the article
Is given mention to a Roxy Salgado
Of Rowland Heights, CA
Or any other person
Who may
Or may not have been
In some way
Responsible
For the accident on the 10 Eastbound that night.

David A. Romero is a Mexican-American spoken word artist from Diamond Bar, CA. Romero has performed at over 75 colleges and universities in over 30 states.
www.davidaromero.com

The Shadow of Time
​
New Year’s 2018 – Bear Mountain
 
The International System of Units has defined a second as 9, 192, 631, 770 cycles of radiation corresponding to the transition between two energy levels of the caesium-133 atom.
 
 
The star glares through the glass;
A frozen lake between two mountains;
The world turns on its spine as it has for billions of years.
 
What’s a year?
 
An accretion of eddies within a vast storm,
An endless trek, but more than the distance
Between two points, a resonance we feel compelled to track,
First with arrays of stone, then with falling grains of sand
And complex contraptions of wheels within wheels,
The heartbeat of liquid crystal, the adumbrations of an atom.
 
I listen to what the geese tell me as they form a V in retreat,
The toad as he descends to his muddy rest,
The perennials as they retract beneath the frost,
The empty symmetry of a hornet’s nest,
And the choir of whales fleeing in the deep.
 
They all return like the tides, so tethered to the sun and moon,
While we chop at time with a pendulous blade,
Doomed to live in its shadow.



Awakening
 
And then, the machine stopped;
the sky began to clear
when the great gears
groaned to a halt;
the ground ceased
its shivering,
stars appeared
and beasts emerged
in our absence,
wings cast shadows
over empty streets.
 
In the gnawing silence,
a distant siren
reminds us of a gruesome tally;
we peer from our doorways
for a ray of hope,
long to walk the paths
we barely noticed.
 
In the ebb and flow
of life and death,
we inhabit the low tides,
a scant respite
from irresistible waves.
 
After a time,
most will return to normal,
become mired
in old assumptions
and petty desires,
to the ways that failed us,
 
But a few will awake
to find that the world
kept turning
and changed:
 
They will walk into the sun
And shed their masks.



Hommage à Neruda
 
What does the horseshoe crab
Search for in the murk
With its single hoof,
 
Or the she-turtle
In her lumbering butterfly
Up the shore?
 
Does the quivering hummingbird
Find solace as it probes
The dreaming delphinium,
 
Or the velvet worm
As it reaches with its toxic jets?
 
Are the choral cicadas
Worshiping the sun
After emerging from seventeen
Years of darkness?
 
What of the myriad species
That have come and gone,
The gargantuan sloth,
The pterosaur that glided
Over a vast ocean
From the Andes to the coast
Of Spain,
Saw the seas rise and fall
Back upon themselves,
 
Just as I slumber and wake
For these numbered days.



L’heure Bleue – The Time of Evening
 
The sun has set, but night has not yet fallen. It’s the suspended hour…
The hour when one finally finds oneself in renewed harmony with the world and the light…The night has not yet found its star.    
-Jacques Guerlain
 
As the world folds into shadow,
A grey tapestry descends:
 
The coyote’s lament from the wild place
Across the creek and the fading chorale
Of the late train awaken crepuscular birds
Who inhabit the rift like rare gods.
 
Abuelo sits in the cleft of a mesquite,
His rolled tobacco flickering
With the fireflies as a dim lantern
Receives the adoration of moths;
 
A cat’s eyes glow green
In the gloaming light
And a cloud of mosquitos
Devoured by a flurry of bats.
 
The outhouse door moans open
And the boy treads quietly
On the moonlit stepping stones,
Through the corn and calabacitas,
Under the windmill as it measures
The October wind;
 
Pupils widen like black holes,
Ingest the night spirits,
And he cannot yet imagine
A world beyond these stars,
Or that he will someday
Live in a place where it’s never dark.


 
Sarabande
 
                              for Zuzana Růžičková
 
 
She clutched the leaves
in her hand
as she waited
to be loaded
onto the waiting truck.
 
Somehow, an angry wind
lifted the notes
and they sailed
down the street
like runaway kites,
 
But the music rode
along in her heart,
persisted through
every kind of horror,
from Auschwitz
to Bergen-Belsen,
antithesis of the camp
accordion and broken
strings’ blithe
accompaniment
to endless roll calls
in the bitter cold,
starvation,
dehydration,
executions
and the merriment
of the guards.
 
Those pages looped
in her head
even as she wrestled
a stray beet from the cold ground,
digging with her fingernails
to feed her dying mother.
 
When she returned
to Prague,
her hands were ruined,
and new monsters
would soon appear
in the streets,
but the Sarabande sang
in her insistent fingers
until it circled the soiled world
like a golden thread.
 
 
 
 
* Harpsichordist, Zuzana Růžičková, is considered one of the great musicians of the 20th century.  She survived Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen.
 
The work in question is J.S. Bach’s E minor Sarabande from the fifth book of English Suites. Růžičková had written it out by hand at the age of 13 to take with her during her internment.

Robert René Galván, born in San Antonio, resides in New York City where he works as a professional musician and poet. His previous collections of poetry are entitled, Meteors and Undesirable: Race and Remembrance.  Galván’s poetry was recently featured in Adelaide Literary Magazine, Azahares Literary Magazine, Burningword Literary Journal, Gyroscope, Hawaii Review, Hispanic Culture Review, Newtown Review, Panoply, Sequestrum, Somos en Escrito, Stillwater Review, West Texas Literary Review, and UU World. He is a Shortlist Winner Nominee in the 2018 Adelaide Literary Award for Best Poem. His work has been featured in several literary journals across the country and abroad and has received two nominations for the 2020 Pushcart Prize and one for Best of the Web. René’s poems also appear in varied anthologies, including Undeniable: Writers Respond to Climate Change and in Puro ChicanX Writes of the 21st Century.

by Rosa Martha Villarreal

—you and I are old;
Old age hath yet his honour and his toil;
Death closes all: but something ere the end,
Some work of noble note, may yet be done[.]
 
—“Ulysses,” Alfred, Lord Tennyson

The theme of Lorna Dee Cervantes’s latest book of poetry is implicit in the title, April on Olympia. When the artist reaches the summit of the mountain, she is faced with her own mortality. Just so that the reader is clear, she includes a section to allude to T.S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland.” April is the cruelest month because it reminds us that the natural cycles of rebirth and death will continue without us. But, as Tomás Rivera said in his existentialist novel …and the earth did not devour him, not yet. The earth has not devoured this poet yet, and there is something still left: the untarnished spirit of youth now imprisoned in an ageing body. There is still something left to do, a final journey of creative consciousness, the gift of a spiritual inheritance to kindred souls who await their conception and birth.
 
Gardens, seeds, memory, and regeneration are recurring ideas and symbols in this collection. The mountain, both a symbol of total dissolution and proximity to the heavens, is where the seeds of fifty years of Cervantes’s artistic career—losses, loves, and quest for social justice—are taken to be planted in the fertile minds of future poets, much like the seed of her mother’s essence and memory in “Unimagined Title” bore fruit in her mind.
 
                       On my murdered mom’s
                       birthday: light rain on expired
                       seed; new garden, mine.
 
Cervantes conjures the ghosts of her literary and artistic godparents, guides of the subconscious mind’s nights of darkness, the givers of the word/logos, which orders the chaos of imagination just as the gardener organizes the fecundity of nature. The artists: Theodore Roethke, Gil Scott Heron, Billie Holliday, Federico García Lorca, Allen Ginsberg. The social warriors who shaped her sensibilities and gave definition to her indignation: César Chávez, Nestora Salgado, Carlos Almaráz. She elaborates in “River: for my murdered mother” that the inheritance of remembrance, sorrow, and the continuum of thought and passion through time are vehicles of freedom because the quest for justice takes longer than one lifetime.
 
                       I remember the river.
                       Word you didn’t want me
                       to use. Meaning Freedom.
                       Meaning liberation from the flame.
 
                       I remember the fire. The lap
                       of genius dissolving it all,
                       the light of the dying leaves,
                       bare fall of it all. I remember.
 
                       River of vein in the brain,
                       the great artery of culture
                       weaving it together with threads,
                       conversations. River of immense sorrow.
 
                       River of forgiveness. River of the riven
                       fallen. River of the gasping. River of icy
                       grasp. Fierce river. Fleet river.
                       Saltless self-revealed in the sunlight.
 
                       I remember the river: word
                       you didn’t want me to speak. Word
                       I free you. Word in your ancient reveal.
                       The word river, a substitute for desire.
 
Nothing is ever destroyed. Desire deferred is but a dormant seed of ancient tree waiting to be born once again. Encased in the stillness of stones, even the collective memories of an entire people seemingly dead await their rebirth. This concept is not mere fancy but an empirical reality because memory is an energy field. Energy is never destroyed, said Newton; can never be destroyed. Matter is energy in another form, birthed in the human mind, reimagined, re-arranged as Cervantes says in “Olmecan Eyes”:
 
                       Olmecan eyes reborn. The infant
                       stone unfurling in our navels.
                       Another civilization reconquers
                       the wilderness of today. Sun devouring
                       Earth, we are shadows of the way
                       we were, beneath the shifting planets,
                       the comets, the desolate inconsolable moon.
 
The ghosts of people from Cervantes’s past appear to her throughout this volume, not just her mother’s but other beloved ones, friends and lovers. “On Feinberg’s Theory of Physics: another for John,” Cervantes continues with the imagery of gardens, rivers, the rebirth and transforms the language of quantum science. An invisible sorrow evokes that same you, says Cervantes: the ever constant in the chaos, “circling aimlessly around some / nowhere no one’s planet loneliness.” The title is an allusion to the theory of retro-causality. After a life is lived, can the summation of experience, the culmination of passion and loss act like a subatomic particle assert itself in time-space and deflect the path of the past?
 
It would be inaccurate to quantify this collection of poetry as solely one individual’s existential reflection. Lorna Dee Cervantes has and continues to be a warrior for human dignity. The imagery of nature and its cycles of decay and regeneration is likewise expressed in political themes, which resonate as strongly as they did in her previous books of poetry. The opening poem “The River Doesn’t Want a Wall” clearly alludes to a former U.S. president’s incendiary rhetoric on a never-built wall that was meant to run along the U.S.-Mexican border. The wall would have done more than just to keep out people; it would have created an artificial, disruptive barrier in the natural world. Nature is not divided. Division is a human construct that is simultaneously a tool for functional organization and an instrument of oppression. Freedom, however, is a natural phenomenon. It is not a coincidence that Thomas Jefferson calls liberty an “unalienable right.” Resistance to oppression is endemic to animal life, of which we are but one species. The rivers of freedom will flood and wipe away the vanity of humans. “The river doesn’t want the Wall. / The land won’t let it. / The floods won’t cede.”
 
In “Poem for Black Lives Matter,” Cervantes asserts that love and memory are weapons of liberation from the false division of societal construct of so-called “race.” (Speaking as a person trained as a biologist, I can assure my readers that there is but one human race. The other human species that existed as late as 16,000-35,000 years ago have died off or been absorbed into our race.)
 
                       Love is a force
                       greater than fear
                       a presence
 
                       and a present
                       a prescience sense
                       a nuclear subatomic
 
                       fusion.
 
The historical division of people by “race” spawned a loathing for the offspring of miscegenation, los desdichados, the undesirables, who were exiled to the margins of society. The center of society, governed and possessed by those who had pre-privileged themselves as “the right people,” dictated who was what, who was worthy of their right to self-determination and who was not. (“College isn’t meant for your people.” “This neighborhood isn’t meant for your people.”) But the center cannot hold forever as Yeats said in “The Second Coming.” However, what is being reborn isn’t Yeats’s horrific beast of darkness slouching towards modernity creating chaos and despair. Rather it is a spiritual re-embracing of what was exiled, new possibilities of being, an aroused consciousness, an awareness that we are part of nature not its rulers. In “What IS XicanX,” Cervantes posits such a return to the one People, the source from which we first became human. Carlos Fuentes said in La región más transparente del aire, that the original is the impure with physical and symbolic miscegenation. The rebirth of a new era begins here with this new people recombined, returned from the exiles of division. XicanX, the mixed ethnic people, represents the inevitable. X encompasses all. Humanity is re-integrated, and we become “The People (and I birth) / in any language.”
 
Let me conclude where I began, with Tennyson’s poem: “[B]ut something ere the end. Some work of noble note, may yet be done.” For the for the visionary warrior—the poet Cervantes—the noble work is the invocation of memory, rebirth, and the quest for enlightened morality. The beauty of Cervantes’s poetry lures us into the realm of primal dreams and a reality that can only be discerned in metaphors. That said, there is just too much packed into each poem for a single review to do this book justice. Lorna Dee Cervantes made us wait since her last book, but it was worth it.

Lorna Dee Cervantes, a Native Californian (Chumash), is an award winning author of six books of poetry. The former Professor of English at CU Boulder, Creative Writing Program, lives and writes in Seattle.

Photo by Poleth Rivas / Secretaría de Cultura CDMX 

Rosa Martha Villarreal, a Chicana novelist and essayist, is a descendant of the 16th century Spanish and Tlaxcatecan settlers of Nuevo Leon, Mexico. She drew upon her family history in her critically acclaimed novels Doctor Magdalena, Chronicles of Air and Dreams: A Novel of Mexico, and The Stillness of Love and Exile, the latter a recipient of the Josephine Miles PEN Literary Award and a Silver Medalist in the Independent Publishers Book Award (2008). She writes a column, “Tertullian’s Corner,” for Somos en escrito Magazine.

​Ana Castillo is a celebrated author of poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and drama. Among her award-winning books are So Far from God: A Novel; The Mixquiahuala Letters; Black Dove: Mamá, Mi’jo, and Me; The Guardians: A Novel; Peel My Love Like an Onion: A Novel; Sapogonia; and Massacre of the Dreamers: Essays on Xicanisma (UNM Press). Born and raised in Chicago, Castillo resides in southern New Mexico.

                          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.

The Door
 
I cannot see through glass
frosted with shadows. Greener
grass edges the pane, beckons.
 
Mosaic of rainbow colors, collaged
on this side of the door, intones
the music of promises
 
bound with hope, the strength
of iron, to buttress my own frailty
I pray will not easily fracture.
 
A dove perching next to me
once whispered in the ears
of my heart in a dream.
 
Though bedside promises blur
with uncertainties, I hear your
voice. I’m opening the door.
            I’m coming home.

The Visit
 
My long-lost sister Lidia
came from Argentina
I rushed to be with her
 
            but waited in the car
            that I left running, prayed
            for courage to climb the steps
 
                        and pass through the door
                        so I’d see her once again
                        even though she was gone
                                                Her body left in a casket

John C. Mannone, an Uruguayan-born Sicilian, has published poems (some bilingual, some in Spanish) in various magazines. In 2017, he was awarded a Jean Ritchie Fellowship in Appalachian literature and served as the celebrity judge for the National Federation of State Poetry Societies in 2018. Two forthcoming collections are Flux Lines: The Intersection of Science, Love, and Poetry (Linnet’s Wings Press, 2021) and Sacred Flute (Iris Press, 2022). He edits poetry for Abyss & Apex and other journals. His parents migrated to the U.S. when he was 4-1/2 years old and he grew up in Baltimore, Maryland. A retired physics professor, John lives in Knoxville, Tennessee.

by Isaac Goldemberg
​​

Isaac Goldemberg was born in Peru in 1945 and has lived in New York since 1964. He is the author of four novels, a collection of short fiction, thirteen collections of poetry
and three plays. His most recent publications are Libro de reclamaciones (Palma de Mallorca, 2018), Philosophy and Other Fables (New York, 2016), Dialoghi con me e con i miei altri/Diálogos conmigo y mis otros (Rome, 2015), and Remember the Scorpion (Los Angeles, 2015). He is also the author of El gran libro de América judía (The Great Book of Jewish America, a 2240-page anthology, 1998). In 1995 his novel The Fragmented Life of Don Jacobo Lerner was selected by a committee of writers and literary critics as one of the best 25 Peruvian novels of all times and in 2001 a panel of international scholars convened by the National Yiddish Book Center chose it as one of the 100 greatest Jewish books of the last 150 years. His work has been translated into several languages and included in numerous anthologies in Latin America, Europe and the United States. He has received the following awards, among
others: the Nuestro Fiction Award (1977), the Nathaniel Judah Jacobson Award (1996), the Estival Theater Award (2003), the Luis Alberto Sánchez Essay Award (2004), the Order of Don Quijote (2005), the Tumi Excellence Award (2014), and the P.E.N. Club of Peru Poetry Award (2015). In 2014, the House of Peruvian Literature in Lima, presented “Tiempos y Raíces” (Times and Roots), a Homage/Exhibition devoted to his life and works.

Isaac Goldemberg nació en Chepén, Perú, en 1945 y reside en Nueva York desde 1964. Ha publicado cuatro novelas, un libro de relatos, trece de poesía y tres obras de
teatro. Sus publicaciones más recientes son Libro de reclamaciones (Palma de Mallorca, 2018), Philosophy and Other Fables (Nueva York, 2016), Dialoghi con me e con i miei altri/Diálogos conmigo y mis otros (Roma, 2015) y Remember the Scorpion (Los Ángeles, 2015). Es autor también de El gran libro de América judía (antología de 2240 páginas, 1998). En 1995 su novela La vida a plazos de don Jacobo Lerner fue
considerada por un comité de escritores y críticos literarios como una de las mejores novelas peruanas de todos los tiempos; y en el 2001 fue seleccionada por un jurado
internacional de críticos literarios convocado por el Yiddish Book Center de Estados Unidos como una de las 100 obras más importantes de la literatura judía mundial de
los últimos 150 años. Su obra ha sido sido traducida a varios idiomas e incluida en numerosas antologías de América Latina, Europa y los Estados Unidos. Ha recibido,
entre otros, el Premio Nuestro de Novela (1977), el Premio Nathaniel Judah Jacobson (1996), el Premio Estival de Teatro (2003), el Premio de Ensayo Luis Alberto Sánchez
(2004), la Orden de Don Quijote (2005), el Premio Tumi a la Excelencia (2014) y el Premio de Poesía del P.E.N. Club del Perú (2015). En 2014, la Casa de la Literatura Peruana en Lima, presentó “Tiempos y Raíces”, una Exhibición/Homenaje dedicada a su vida y obra.

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.

Luna para poetas asesinados
​​
                    Creyeron que te enterraban
                    ​y lo que hacían era enterrar una semilla.
                         Ernesto Cardenal, epitafio para la tumba
                         de Adolfo Báez Bone revolucionario nicaragüense
 
          para los poetas de Myanmar,
          y todos los poetas muertos
          ​resistiendo tiranía.

Inmensa, cerca a la Tierra, la luna,
jala a las mareas de los mares
y de la sangre.
En la sombra de la Tierra,
se tiñe escarlata
como laca birmana
por los atardeceres de la Tierra.
¿O será que se ruboriza de furia,
partera, madrina de la vida?
La sangre de sus sumos sacerdotes,
los poetas, corre roja en las calles
 
Pero mátenos
y otros se levantarán.
Palabras cargadas
de verdad, belleza, amor
no mueren; encienden el pensar
y hacen revolución en el corazón.

Moon for Murdered Poets

                    They thought that they buried you
                    & what they did was bury a seed.
                         Ernesto Cardenal, epitaph for the tomb
                               of Adolfo Báez Bone, Nicaraguan revolutionary

          for the poets of Myanmar,
          & all poets killed
          ​resisting tyranny.
 
Huge, near Earth, the moon
pulls at the tides of the sea
and of the blood.
In the Earth’s shadow,
she is tinged scarlet,
like Burmese lacquer,
by the sunsets of the Earth.
Or is it that she flushes in fury,
midwife, godmother of life?
The blood of her high-priests,
the poets, runs red in the streets.
 
But kill us
and others will rise.
Words freighted
with truth, beauty, love
do not die; they ignite thought
and make revolution in the heart.
 
© 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/.