Día de los Muertos 2020Max and his uncle Joedeath’s many signatures in Sicily’s quicksilver seas the moon and its argent micronauts uncounted in the recesses of Sierra Madre actors with faces of timeless burros named Cárdenas foraging in sugar cane coldness at the center of the sun seventeen years or forty-nine years the instant is the same for whatever happens the body is only the thought of the body incense and wharves of the conquistadores liana and ivy snares at the hour’s second end how often this occurs and cannot recall the why and which the who and wherefore the canals of Tenochtitlán lose their way among withered rooftop garlands I remember nothing after pushing the green button but salutes of armless angels the rose through which a river pours and summers that belong to memory’s only syllable and heat the roar of Aetna’s ovens twenty marigold flowers Narcissus and Hyacinth eye and pulp of repercussion blindness of water and depths where night’s riddle threads an unheard harp calacas y calaveras ! thousands at play with missing fingers nameless deities in a single afternoon making rosaries of light smoke snaking through vowels of perpetuity toys that imitate sleep’s small noises tender the hair that falls around the wing shimmering hues of nacre consonants why is speech so difficult today ? colibrí ! ruby-throated messenger of death clouds the size of silence and glass motion and gravity have lost all sense evening fades in the vestibule of echo one hand seeks the other in an abyss of shape darkness of words dos mariposas de la noche ! 11-01-20 ![]() 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.
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New Poems by Ivan ArgüellesTAMAZUNCHALE antes de abrir la demencia para descubrir palabra tras palabra que no tiene sentido diccionario de pulmones ! pulgas y rascacielos ! para mejor comprender lo que pasa dentro del ladrillo rojo al margen de la calle que nos lleva al sur donde los muertos tratan de olvidar lo que pasó ayer cuando la gran máquina de nubes y sonidos se acostó al lado del mar que sufre tantas camas inexplicables y sin eco y ahora dime que quieres con tus ojos apagados y tu mente como sirena de ulises llamando a todos los náufragos que la ambulancia está lista a partir ! ya me voy hacia la mejor tortillera que hay para besarla en su coma de vidas paralelas y entonces con una tristeza mundial seguiré caminando un brazo mas famoso que el otro una oreja de piedra y otra en ninguna parte para qué poner en dos el uno ? multiplicar significa morir ! 07-21-20 TEOCALLI for Joe who appeared yesterday morning for a fraction of an instant in the doorway standing in the light of the morning sun confused with radiance and dazzling the stanzas of an unwritten poem shift in the monumental distances of air crane-feathered shafts rotate like minds ablaze in the pyramidal distances of sky stone built on stone stepping to heaven solar flares like tongues speaking loud the destructions of cloud and thunder and ever deeper the effects of amnesia rain drowning cities of fine dust citadels of bone and tumult havoc of wheels spun out of control bringing down all ten directions and mountains reared overnight to mark off the western margin where the archaic sea darkens rushing to mirror itself in a dream of feathers and the twins up and down they go tracing each periphery of rock and grass measuring how far it is to the lunar aleph fading like dissolved aspirin at dawn what fills the ear at such an early hour if not the Sanskrit parrot reciting chronologies and adamantine dynasties names none can rightly recall inscribed on the reverse of coins or obliterated by a mere thumb on porous sandstone libraries ! the tomb of words and to speak the labyrinthine dialects communing with deities of the Unseen and Unheard pages torn at random from the codex depicting the origins of divine Chaos night ! splendors of ink in canyons where the dead revive use of their hands such a morning atop the great Teocalli converting sums of air into breathless voice hail all the heights and renown of fire ! we have come down the Panamerican visiting each of the summers of 1953 and talking backwards to mummified relatives wrapped in serapes of liquid gold we will never reach tomorrow for sure the Nymph death will take one of us before the prophesy can be fulfilled every day is this single bright moment standing like phantom pharaohs immobile in the pellucid movie film of memory you are me and I am you ! there is grass and maps strewn all over the lawn and avenues that stretch as far back as the first city carved out of the womb ten minutes apart the matching Teocallis that cast no shadow only black light ! 06-11-20 canción del parque chapultepec cronología del aire ! arquitectura de las nubes ! soy de poco valor que lástima ! las abejas en sus columnas verticales de azul incendiado chupando chupando los huesos de la hierba dormida soy azteca soy caldeo soy de mucho valor sierras de sueño blanco que veo nomás cuando estoy nadando en mi césped de memorias todo verde desde el hombro izquierdo de césar vallejo hasta la rodilla derecha de garcía lorca acumulando los dos las muchas muertes de la luz aunque vivimos como momias en Tenochtitlan apenas sufriendo el tránsito de los motores de las plumas yo lo único que soy es la luna chafada y transparente como aspirina a mediodía y hay mares invisibles que suben los pirámides de la frontera pistolas con ojos ! ahi viene la bala ! dame mi caballo corrompido yo soy peruano el último dios soy el mero dios de la basura hieroglífica de chapultepec fumando como nunca las chispas baratas de las olas que han venido a ahogar el estado de california poco a poco y a menudo con sus pronombres y hierro de lenguas mas muertas que el sol negro tapadera y tumba del fuego silencioso de mis pasos en el jardín unitario de la duda y por eso digo yo soy 06-17-20 ![]() 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. Rinconcito is a special little corner in Somos en escrito for short writings: a single poem, a short story, a memoir, flash fiction, and the like. El Bronx, Bogotá D.C. |
Sarah Cortez is a Councilor of the Texas Institute of Letters and Fellow of the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Winner of the PEN Texas Literary Award, she has placed finalist in the Writers’ League of Texas awards and the PEN Southwest Poetry Awards. She has won the Southwest Book Award, multiple International Latino Book Awards, and the Skipping Stones Honor Award. Sarah edited Vanishing Points: Poems and Photographs of Texas Roadside Memorials (Texas Review Press, 2016) with original poems by Larry D. Thomas, Jack B. Bedell, Sarah Cortez, and Loueva Smith. Its driving force has been the photography of roadside memorials taken over a ten-year period in the San Antonio-Austin area by Dan Streck. |
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