por Adriana Gordillo

​Inmigrante
 
Este vacío en el pecho
No sabe a quién llenar.
Crece poquito a poco,
se va hinchando
hasta dar fruto
a un llanto suave
ahogado con gemiditos grises
y pálpitos acompasados
que se ocultan en cada esquina
de este hogar
lejos del hogar
al otro lado del mar

Problemas de lenguaje
 
Un muro de silencio se erige entre nosotros
cada vez que tu miedo y mi temor
se encuentran.
 
Dicen por ahí que es un problema de lenguaje.
Que tu inglés y mi español no se entienden.
Que tu mundo y el mío se desconocen.
 
No les creas.
Nuestro problema es la certeza
de nuestros mundos
 
Y tu solución
es ignorarnos

Adriana Gordillo es colombiana de nacimiento y vive actualmente en Saint Paul, Minnesota. Trabaja como profesora de español, literatura y cultura latinoamericana en Minnesota State University, Mankato. Ha publicado poemas en las revistas Alborismos y Letras Femeninas. Ha recibido premios de poesía como el premio Victoria Urbano (2011) otorgado por la Asociación Internacional de Literatura y Cultura Femenina Hispánica (AILCFH) y Voces nuevas de la Editorial Torremozas en 2014. Adriana es también una entusiasta de las artes visuales y algunas de sus fotografías han sido exhibidas en eventos artísticos en Minnesota.

​​ by Sylvia Eugenia

the mother in your memory movie reminds me. my own mother in real life.
palpably uncomfortable. polite. Puetoricenio en tu vida. instead
pero…skin tone…voice tone…thats them (thats us) same but different
I want to hear your friend speak in Spanish. Will you tell him? …the street makes
us a threesome…I'm Poly for the art scene.
When it was once then for a life time, they remember. I see the halo glow of a martyr to a mind. Your brain shares that
similar smile to mine and no one knows what resides inside. Between us. Asimilar.
dissimilar. unsimilar. to the outside. Someone tugged you out under this sun and
brought that bloodline out with it. Pushed out another one constantly cradling
their own demons.
 
Now stuck with the only them, the only I. I dreamt I had your swagger. Alone in a
city park at night imagining the world, I'd be terrified. I can't run. The fear comes
up fast. Predicted from in between my legs. My night sky is a retired ceiling fan
casting shadows like a flower with only half its petals remaining.
 
This is how I learned to bring a deadish body down the stairs.
 
Slipping to the trip, my shins would be scraped shreds. Lead legs.
Head over heels my arrogance of the assumed ease brings me to the slip and slide
plastic of a gurney ride
I'm over the concrete edge. gums dangling meat threads ...curbstomp of
consequence
Sputtering up snake eyes in teeth. rolling against the roof
 
I've seen parts of this movie, watched gravity pull her to concrete like a
desperate, disheveled…lover? beloved? hard-up darling? Flat down hard fuck.
Only they share that collision despite those who watch and think they feel the
crash. Bone to brick, rail against cheek. A mouth first tastes copper-lemon from
the side. An unfinished european kiss

​​Sylvia Eugenia combines elements of fiction and memoir into a prose poetry.
Her poems have no structure except, the pauses in her breath and metronome of her heartbeat.
​
She graduated from Mills College, Oakland, California, with a BA in English, with an emphasis in Creative Writing. She has presented her work at many small readings in Southern California and the San Francisco Bay Area. In 2013, she performed at Beast Crawl in Oakland and Lit. Crawl in San Francisco. She lives in Santa Cruz, Cali.​

​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.

Dr. Diana Aldrete is a bicultural, first-generation Mexican-Salvadoran-American living in Hartford, CT. She is a Visiting Lecturer of Hispanic Studies at Trinity College. She is also an abstract painter, a writer, and a musician. She was born in Milwaukee, WI before moving to Guadalajara Mexico where she did her primary education, and later moved back to the U.S. where she has been ever since. She has published a short fiction in Spanish “Los charales” in Diálogo: an Interdisciplinary Studies Journal, and the academic article “The Ruins of Modernity: Synecdoche of Neoliberal Mexico in Roberto Bolaño’s 2666” in Ecofictions, Ecorealities and Slow Violence in Latin America and the Latinx World, 2019.