by Elizabeth Monreal

Your blood was the deepest red my town had ever seen  
But your face remained that of an angel’s,  
White and soft, untouched by death. 
The sun kissed your cheek,  
Not wasting a beam of its light on anything else. 
You remained golden, you remained bright  
Even as we died slowly in darkness. 
 
Your laughter haunts this town.  
They say it was like honey, like morning dew. 
And now all of this has become you: 
The whisper of rain, the dim glow of fireflies, the fragrance of flowers 
Adorning the gentle earth that your shadow once touched.  
​
Your goodness haunts this town.  
Your body makes this earth fruitful, 
But your grave makes all your mourners blind to its beauty. 
The absence of your soft soul  
Warming their desolate streets  
Made a wasteland out of a paradise. 
This you would not recognize as your town.  
 
Your legend echoes from here to Guadalajara  
And no city escapes you.  
They named their sons after you, Gabi. 
Their tears fill up their wells. 
You keep them nourished even in their melancholy.  
Here, a foreigner might hear your name  
Taken by the wind and think you are a god 
“Is he a martyr? Is he a saint?  
Who is this Gabriel you all worship so?” 
You are the last good thing  
Anyone will ever know of this town. 
 
Gabi, if this must be your death, 
Let it be your last.  
Because in all the years after, they still tell your story here 
And you still die at the end of each retelling.  
But when the melody of your footsteps  
Walks your mother back home at night,  
We know the sun will rise once again on this town.  

​Gabriel “Gabi” Contreras Ruiz died in a car accident when he was fifteen years old. He was on a class field trip, riding in the trunk of a classmate’s truck with several other classmates. On the way to Teocuitatlán, the truck hit a rock, causing it to flip upside down. All of the children were hurt, but only Gabi passed away. The people of Cítala continue to remember him as a force of goodness in their town.

Conocí a Iván en los años ochenta del siglo pasado. Neeli Cherkovski me sugirió contactarme con Iván, poeta mayor y bibliotecario políglota de UC Berkeley. Me dio un ambiguo retrato: afirmó que llevaría una chamarra de mezclilla azul y el pelo alborotado sobre la frente, con un copete cayendo lacio sobre los anteojos. Esa imagen no ha cambiado en casi medio siglo.
 
No lo he olvidado. En el caudaloso río de estudiantes que cruzaban Sproul Plaza, la explanada central del campus, vi a una persona que caminaba lentamente, libro en mano, leyendo. Lo que más me impresionó fue que pudiera caminar y leer a la vez, sin alterar el tráfico estudiantil. Un ojo al gato y otro al garabato. Era Iván Argüelles.
 
Hoy en día, los jóvenes manejan y textean, atienden a una clase y mandan correos electrónicos y selfies al mismo tiempo. Se jactan de ser la generación de los delfines, que pueden mantener cinco conversaciones simultáneas y estar atentos a todas, inmaculados. En aquella época, éramos distintos. Nuestros padres nos educaron al ritmo de adagios como: “El que come y canta, loco se levanta.” “Concéntrate.” “Una cosa a la vez. Lo demás es caos.” Tal vez Iván Argüelles se adelantó a su tiempo o, más bien, siempre ha sido atemporal. Maneja con destreza sorprendente muchas lenguas: griego, latín, sánscrito, hindi y bengali, inglés, español, francés, portugués, italiano, alemán, catalán, rumano, etc. Y piensa en todas ellas, sin mengua. Alguna vez le pregunté cómo podía sostener su conocimiento de tantos idiomas. Me comentó sin inmutarse que alternaba los días y leía un poema o fragmentos en las lenguas que conoce. Es una costumbre que guarda desde que lo conozco.
 
Jack Foley escribió en 2010: “Iván Argüelles es uno de los más finos poetas de este siglo; sin embargo, sólo lo conocen unos cuantos de sus apasionados partidarios. Su obra es ‘difícil’ pero no más difícil que la de otros poetas más conocidos, y su poesía es mejor que la de ellos.” Su estética se ancla en la imagen vertiginosa, anacrónica, multidireccional y explosiva. John M. Bennett afirma que debemos leer la obra de Argüelles “con una manera nueva de pensar / with a new mind-set.” Y añade este fino consejo: “Uno debe dejarse llevar, “ahogarse” en el océano de esta sorprendente y proteica obra, y ser receptivo a todas las ambigüedades y contradicciones que contiene.” En muchas instancias, Argüelles se vale de monólogos dramáticos--siempre con una especie de máscara—y “una suerte de conciencia surrealista desnuda” que (afirma con acierto Jack Foley) deliberadamente busca, como Yeats, “the face I had / Before the world was done.”

​El método de Argüelles es inmediato y visceral. Hay que captarlo antes de entenderlo e incluso “no entenderlo.” Su poesía es panóptica y diacrónica: es decir, puede referirse, sin cortes transversales, al Gilgamesh y a olvidadas diosas fenicias, o recordar a su hermano gemelo subiendo las gradas de la pirámide de Teotihuacan, monologar con Caballo Loco, retratar a Dante, invocar los ojos de Elizabeth Taylor, silbar una tonada de Elvis Presley o un concierto de Mozart, monologar con Astolfo en la luna, o meditar sobre la nave de David Bowie que acaba de dejar el planeta y estalla en medio del polvo sideral. Sus imágenes son desaforadamente despegadas del significante y las palabras resuenan en múltiples lenguas, lanzadas sin sentido hacia inesperadas direcciones, como en una erupción gramatical de lava incontenible que, a sus 83 años, todavía arde y no se detiene.

Afirmé que su poesía es panóptica y diacrónica. Lo reitero. En aquel primer almuerzo del siglo pasado, en Larry Blakes, uno de los templos del blues desaparecidos, Iván Argüelles me regaló varios de sus poemarios; entre ellos Instamatic Reconditioning – Recondicionamiento instamático (1978), un título que todavía hoy no alcanzo a comprehender de manera cabal. Ahí encontré un poema admirable que ejemplifica los adjetivos que menciono. Se trata de “Antes de que llegara el Buda.” En esa visión panóptica hay algo misterioso que mueve fibras sensoriales arcaicas. Hoy se habla de memoria ancestral o información genética. El lector tiene la sensación de que Iván Argüelles estaba allí, en la más recóndita prehistoria, entre las primeras manadas de seres humanos, colgado de una rama, en espera del Avatar que otorgó conciencia al mundo. Tal es la plenitud y convicción de sus palabras. Con ese poema abrimos esta antología.​

A memento of the translator and the poet meeting in San Francisco in front of City Lights Books: Neeli Cherkovski, Iván Argüelles, Steven Schwartz and Arturo Dávila, ca 1986

I met Iván in the 80s of the last century. Neeli Cherkovski suggested that I contact Iván, a major poet and polyglot librarian at UC Berkeley. Neeli gave me an ambiguous description: he stated that Iván would be wearing a blue-jean jacket, his hair tousled on his forehead with a pompadour falling straight over his glasses. That image has not changed in almost half a century.

I have not forgotten it. In the mighty river of students that crossed the central Sproul Plaza of the UC Berkeley campus, I saw a person who was walking slowly, book in hand, reading. What impressed me most was that he could walk and read at the same time without disrupting student traffic. Un ojo al gato y otro al garabato. It was Iván Argüelles.

Today, young people drive and text, attend class and send e-mails, snapchats, and selfies at the same time. They take pride in being “the generation of the dolphins,” who can hold five simultaneous conversations and be attentive to all of them imperturbably. In our time, we were different. Our parents raised us to the rhythm of adagios like: “He who eats and sings his brain spins.” “Excess is no success.” “One thing at a time. The rest is chaos.” Perhaps Iván Argüelles was ahead of his time or, rather, he has always been timeless. He handles many languages ​​with surprising skill: Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, Hindi and Bengali, English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Italian, German, Catalan, Romanian, etc. And he uses of all of them interchangeably. I once asked him how he could sustain his knowledge of so many languages. He told me without flinching that he read a poem or fragments in each of the languages he knew every day, as much as possible. It is a habit he has kept since I have known him.

​Jack Foley wrote in 2010: “Iván Argüelles is one of this century’s finest poets, yet he remains known to only a few passionate partisans. His work is ‘difficult,’ but it is no more difficult than the work of many better-known poets--and his work is better than theirs.” His aesthetic is anchored in vertiginous, anachronistic, multidirectional, expansive, and explosive images. John M. Bennett states that we must read Argüelles’s work with “a new mind-set.” He adds this fine piece of advice: “one has to allow oneself to be ‘drowned’ in the ocean of this stunning and protean work and be receptive to all the ambiguities and contradictions it contains.” In many instances, Argüelles makes use of masked dramatic monologues and a naked surrealist unconscious that, according to Jack Foley, deliberately reveals, like Yeats, “the face I had / Before the world was made.”

​Iván Argüelles’ method is immediate and visceral. You must grasp it before you understand it and even “not understand it.” His poetry is panoptic and diachronic: id est, he can refer, without cross sections, to Gilgamesh and forgotten Phoenician goddesses, or remember his twin brother climbing the steps of the Teotihuacan pyramid, engage in a monologue with Crazy Horse, portray Dante, invoke Elizabeth Taylor’s eyes, whistle a tune by Elvis Presley or a Mozart concerto, ride with Astolfo to the moon, or meditate on David Bowie’s ship that has just left the planet and is about to explode in the middle of the cosmic dust. His images are wildly detached from the signifier and the words resonate in multiple languages. They are thrown aimlessly in unexpected directions, as in a grammatical eruption of irrepressible lava that, at age 84, still burns incessantly.
​
I had previously stated that his poetry is panoptic and diachronic. I repeat this affirmation. At that first lunch with him at Larry Blake’s in the 80s, one of the longtime temples to the blues in the Bay Area, Iván Argüelles gave me several collections of his poetry, among them Instamatic Reconditioning (1978), a title that I still cannot fully understand today. I found an admirable poem that exemplifies the adjectives I mention in this collection. It is titled, “Before the Buddha came.” In the poem’s panoptic vision, there is something enigmatic that moves our ancient senses. Today we talk about ancestral memory or genetic information. The reader has the feeling that Iván Argüelles was there, in the deepest prehistory, among the first troops of human beings, hanging from a branch, waiting for the Enlightened One. Such is the fullness and conviction of his words. We open this anthology with that poem.

Arturo Dávila S.
Laney College
Oakland, California
February 2023

1.- Before the Buddha came
 
there were many of them
sleeping on the trees
or awake just watching from a
silvery distance the glistening backs
of animals
as if preparing the idea of the hunt
faces composed of aspirin and fur
teeth like combs riveted into
the shoulders of their mates
drawing a slow dream-like fluid
with which to tread the new moon
 
they have forgotten the dusky witness 
of the stars
now dwindling like orbs of dust
in the back mind of the sky
they have come down to the ground
to spend years inside the hides
of what they have killed
soon they will be persons
inventing units of thought or
describing parallel selves with which
to explain the strange inconvenience
of dying
 
1.- Antes de que llegara el Buda
 
había muchos de ellos
durmiendo en los árboles
o despiertos tan sólo mirando desde una
distancia plateada las espaldas relucientes
de animales
como si prepararan la idea de la caza
caras compuestas de aspirina y piel
dientes como peines clavados en
los hombros de sus compañeras
dibujando un fluido lento como un sueño
con el que pisar la luna nueva
 
han olvidado al testigo oscuro
de las estrellas
menguando ahora como orbes de polvo
en la mente oculta del cielo
han bajado al suelo
para pasar años dentro de los cueros
de lo que han matado
pronto serán personas
inventando unidades de pensamiento o
describiendo seres paralelos con los cuales
puedan explicar el extraño inconveniente
de morir

19.- Buffalo
 
under our feet
the grass has stopped rolling
a single cigarette undoes the leaves
metal appears for no reason at all
where we need to sleep
the horizon disappears in a zipper
our hooves sink in miles of paper
a thin flame piercing us
flank to flank
catalogs the function of our skin
 
in a still pool
somewhere to the far west of here
a god with a sky blue jaw
with creosote heels
with celluloid eyes
with a magnificent tin lapel
and a railroad ticket that works like a clock
is eating the last of us
   
19.- Búfalo
 
bajo nuestros pies
la hierba ha dejado de rodar
un solo cigarrillo deshace las hojas
el metal aparece sin razón alguna
donde necesitamos dormir
el horizonte desaparece en un ziper
nuestros cascos se hunden en millas de papel
una fina flama que nos atraviesa
flanco a flanco
cataloga la función de nuestra piel
 
en un estanque tranquilo
en algún lugar al lejano oeste de aquí
un dios con mandíbulas azul cielo
con tacones de creosota
con ojos de celuloide
con una magnífica solapa de hojalata
y un boleto de tren que funciona como un reloj
se está comiendo al último de Nosotros

22.- Illegal Sintax
 
where there can be only confusion... sleeping among the dead the glorious
ones who came through fire remembering the shore
where the shadows grew warm… dreaming in the dark oak-groves
strangling in the ivy childhoods already violent with the future
gods incarcerated in the pinnacle where a reading continues daily
about the seas underfoot about the paths divine about the morphology
desperately convulsed... orgasmic messages to earth the humus
the detritus of that other reality ... watching the screen for some
real significance for that burning for that ultimate signal on high
as they bring their barks to this strand exhausted with the lie of delivery
cattle in the meadow of their memory… bleeding hospices… dung
ancient with a forgotten tradition how they lift their palms waving
that one great feather of pampas grass and it is night already
not the mild one with fragrances and the calling of exotic birds
but the ruddy treacherous one where the planets acknowledge aloud
the illegal syntax the dread omens… falling from the heavens
the once considered pure the body and spirit      the demi-gods
“how can I touch the consecrated moment of     the imminent echo?”
… sluggish the source of the Meander the water of tragedy
where they stepped convinced this is the hour or the life of Noon
the meridian of philosophy the Holy the exchange of the sexes
…………………………………………………….
 
what kind of guilt is blindness combined with total recall of the visible?
each leaf extends its oratory to the eternal optic nerve…
the sea returns its buried to the skin of the Universal Day
and all around they cast their illicit glances waiting for History
to incarnate them those for whom the Republic was an uncultivated Vine
… the azure the crown the ring of day-stars dripping fiery dew
Enigmas… who can elude their passionate and embryonic solitude?

22.- Sintaxis ilegal
 
donde sólo puede haber confusión... durmiendo entre los muertos
los gloriosos que vinieron desde el fuego recordando la orilla
donde las sombras se calentaban… soñando en los oscuros robledales
estrangulando infancias de hiedra ya violentas con el porvenir
dioses encarcelados en el pináculo donde una lectura continúa diariamente
sobre los mares bajo los pies sobre los caminos divinos sobre la morfología
desesperadamente convulsionada…  mensajes orgásmicos a la tierra el humus
los detritus de esa otra realidad… mirando la pantalla para buscar algún
significado real alguna quemadura alguna señal definitiva en lo alto
mientras traen sus ladridos a esta ribera exhaustos con la mentira de la entrega
ganado en el prado de su memoria… hospicios sangrantes… estiércol
antiguo con una tradición olvidada cómo levantan sus palmas saludando
a esa gran pluma de hierbas de la pampa y ya es de noche
no la suave con fragancias y el canto de pájaros exóticos
sino la rojiza traicionera donde los planetas reconocen en voz alta
la sintaxis ilegal los temibles presagios… cayendo desde los cielos
los una vez considerados puros ¡el cuerpo y el espíritu los semidioses!
“¿cómo puedo tocar el momento consagrado del eco inminente?”
… perezosa la fuente del Meandro el agua de     la tragedia
donde pisaron convencidos de que ésta es la hora de la vida El Mediodía
el meridiano de la filosofía El Sagrado el  intercambio de los sexos
…………………………………………………
¿qué clase de culpa es la ceguera combinada con el recuerdo total de lo visible?
cada hoja extiende su oratoria hasta el eterno nervio óptico…
el mar devuelve sus muertos a la piel del Día Universal
y a su alrededor lanzan miradas ilícitas esperando la Historia
para encarnar en ellos a aquéllos para quienes     la República era una vid inculta
… el azur la corona el anillo de estrellas diurnas goteando rocío ardiente
Enigmas…. ¿quién puede eludir su soledad apasionada y embrionaria?

Iván Argüelles is the author of many books, including: “That” Goddess; Madonna Septet; Comedy , Divine , The,; Fiat Lux; Orphic Cantos; Tamazunchale, and many others. Born in 1939 in Rochester, Minnesota, he has lived variously in Mexico City, Chicago, New York City, Macerata, Italy, and settled in Berkeley, California. A retired librarian, he was employed by the New York Public Library and The Library of the University of California at Berkeley. His collection, Looking for Mary Lou, received the 1989 William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. In 2010, he received a National Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation for his early selected poems, The Death of Stalin. This collection, Sintaxis Ilegal, written in English, was translated into Spanish by Arturo Dávila and published by the Universidad Autónoma de Nuevo León.

Arturo Dávila S. is Chair of the Department of Modern Languages at Laney College in Oakland, California. He specializes in contemporary Latin American poetry and Colonial Literature (the conquest of Mexico). He is poet laureate in Spain and Mexico where he won the following prizes for his books: La ciudad dormida (“Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz” Prize, México, 1995), Catulinarias ("Antonio Machado" Prize, Spain, 1998), Poemas para ser leídos en el Metro (“Juan Ramón Jiménez” Prize, Spain, 2003), and La cuerda floja (“Nicolás Guillén” Prize, Caribbean Philosophical Association-CPA, 2015). Some other publications include, Alfonso Reyes entre nosotros (UANL, 2010), an extensive prologue on poems by the same author, Homero en Cuernavaca (2014), the anthology La Tinusa. Poetas latinoamericanos in the USA (Aldus-Secretaría de Cultura, 2016), Sátiras (Hiperión, Spain, 2017), and more recently Tantos troncos truncus (Casa Vacía, 2020), and También garganta el mar (Casa Vacía, 2023). At present he is compiling a second anthology of 21st century Latin American poets living in the USA and doing research on pre-Hispanic codices and re-visions of the conquest of Mexico. 

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.