Z is for Zapatazo 
 
I started learning my ABC’s before I could even read. The first lesson involved a woman collapsed in the back lot of the Bronx tenement where we lived. Something had scared her nearly to death. There in the pouring rain she lay writhing and screaming out her wits while neighbors watched from the covered balconies and fire escapes. R is for Rat.
 
Another lesson was connected to chickens in that time when “children should be seen and not heard.” The Spanish version had, as usual, more syllables as well as color: “Los niños hablan cuando las gallinas mean.” “Children talk when the chickens pee.” Those who relate to chicken only in conveniently dismembered extra crispy form may ask when or how often do chickens pee? Never. We Nuyoricans, Spanglish-speaking Gothamites, who had never seen a chicken except when it arrived steaming aromatically on a plate with rice and beans, nevertheless knew well that chickens don’t relieve themselves like little boys and girls. C is for Chickens.
 
We moved to California, that hub of social contradictions. There I was raised on breezy primetime shows, punctuated by interruptions about some protest march, police suppression, riot, space-race launch, cold war threat, assassination, or other scary event. For a while it seemed like “We Interrupt This Program” was part of the regular TV line up. Maybe that’s why there were so many sitcoms and family shows – diversions from the worry and sheer terror. The shows conveyed placid American suburbs lined with houses that never needed painting, populated by families like the Andersons, the Nelsons, and the Cleavers, lovingly and rationally ruled by parents that never yelled or hit or even had sex.
 
Meanwhile, on this side of the fourth wall, verbal and physical discipline was natural. So natural in fact that it was conveyed in a Spanish-language ABC book for children. The benign English version that the Cleavers read had, “A is for Apple, B is for Ball, C is for Cat” and so on, to the last letter, “Z is for Zoo.” A logical entry for the Spanish Zeta (Z) would have been Zapato (Shoe), something every Latino child would know. But instead it read, “Z es por Zapatazo” (paraphrased: Z is for Shoe Missile). The expounded letter was accompanied by a drawing of a dark-haired child with its wincing face cocked to the side from the impact of a flying shoe. A friend recalled the book to me years later and we responded with equal parts laughter and loathing at the kind of mentality that would include such a casually violent lesson in what is perhaps the most basic childhood introduction to an intelligible world.
 
History reminds me, however, that Anglo American ways of child rearing were not so idyllic as the TV shows portrayed. In colonial New England, a child’s education went hand in hand with physical discipline. The 1691 edition of The New England Primer for children had ABC lessons that included: “F: The idle FOOL is whipt at school,” and “J: JOB feels the rod, yet blesses God.” And even as the belt-free world of “Father Knows Best” and “Leave It To Beaver” was being beamed into televisions across North America, teachers in schools who looked just like Robert Young and Barbara Billingsley blistered our tender behinds with every device imaginable, from ping pong paddles to a cricket bat perforated in wood shop by one particularly sadistic misanthrope to cut wind resistance.
 
I can at least affirm that I advanced in my ABC’s fairly early in the game – my older brother, not so much. If I say that too frequently I followed a crowd of kids to an afterschool fight only to discover that my brother was one of the young gladiators, you’ll understand what I mean. The same feckless pugnacity repeatedly got him into needless trouble at home, where there was no immunity of non-combatants. K is for Knucklehead.
 
Years later, my mom and stepdad divorced. (My birth father I knew only through an old wedding photograph and mom’s spectacularly imaginative comparisons to our misbehavior.) By then I was married, living at the other end of the country and going to seminary. I did not know the degree to which their split had affected me. Then one evening, after my wife had gone to bed and I stayed up studying, I sank into an abyss of grief, crying and shaking uncontrollably.
 
Gone were the family parties when we kids listened to music and played while our parents did…whatever parents did at parties, until the sensuous Puerto Rican food appeared miraculously on the table to be gobbled up by gangly calorie-burning urchins, leaving the mess to be cleaned up by elves while we slept soundly wherever our bodies happened to land. Gone was the Monorail, and the Matterhorn, It’s A Small World, and the Adventure Thru Inner Space courtesy of Monsanto. Gone Knott’s berry pie. Gone the excursions to Pacific Ocean Park, Redondo Beach, and Newport Dunes, the broiling burgers, the quenching watermelon.
 
Gone the chilly early hours of Christmas when we’d sneak out of our beds to peek at the gift-wrapped silhouettes under the tree and imagine they were what we wanted. Gone a mother’s tender ministrations when any of us kids were sick. Gone her tears when she saw mine after a broken wrist ended high school gymnastics. Gone the rosary prayer circles and sleepless nights when my brother was in hospital with brain tumors. Gone the frantic calling for my sister lost in a Tijuana bazaar. Gone the tears of joy when she was found. Gone the dreaded daily tablespoon of cod liver oil and the sting of Mercurochrome on scraped knees and elbows.
 
Gone dad’s brutal six-day workweek that underwrote our lives. Gone when the family sat around the only television in the house after eating dinner at the same table, at the same time, and the wild symphony of everyone talking at once. Gone the laughter, I’m talking Puerto Rican laughter, the world series of laughter, now only faint bells in the distant steeple of my memory. Z is for Zapatazo.

The Fall of Middle Earth 
 
One day, I went to that land
between home and school, shocked
to find it invaded. The scene
looked like a horde of dragons,
their plated skin clattering,
their movement stuttering
like some Harryhausean nightmare,
and generals commanding troops
in white helmets from blue paper
battle plans. The noise
cracked the sky’s thin blue shell
and soot from organ pipe nostrils
nearly blocked out the running yolk
of the sun. Mandibles dropped open
dripping an earthy stew
then clammed shut with the metallic
squeal of lightning, like colossal
hinges on the gates of Mordor,
maws of these steel-veined horrors
engorging and disgorging
dirt, rocks, grasses, trees,
nests, warrens, dens and cloisters,
secret gardens, fens and shires.
Fangorn, Moria, Rivendell...

How I started hating
   conspiracy theories

                                                                     How often the truth is just not sexy enough.
                                                                     But the lie? Now that’s an orgy.
​
In the fifth grade I caught the flu so bad I missed two weeks of school. When I returned my teacher got down on one knee to look me in the eyes and said: “Ruben, are you OK? I heard you got in trouble with the law and went to juvenile detention.” “Home with the flu,” I said. “Nearly died. Didn’t you get mom’s letter?” “I heard you were really in juvie.” “Nope. Home sick. Nearly died.” He walked away disappointed, in the same way dogs find catching cars disappointing. That year I was “Juvie Rubie,” hang all my protestations for truth. Even today, I’m Juvie Rubie.

I Don’t Mean 
 
I don’t mean to doubt your faith but
             why doesn’t it make you good to me?
 
I don’t mean to question your scriptures
but why are the sweet parts applied to you
and the harsh parts to me?
 
I don’t mean to be aloof but why does god love you
unconditionally but me conditionally?
 
I don’t mean to sound unpatriotic
but why does the god of the universe bless
America over other nations, and before that Rome,
or France, or Germany, or Spain, then England?
 
I don’t mean to risk your wrath but why does god
look and act like the latest rulers?
 
I don’t mean to appear radical but why does god favor
your race over mine?
 
I don’t mean to feel cheated, but why does god answer
your prayers and not mine – when you got the job I didn’t,
and the traffic lights you believe worked for you
made me miss my friend’s last moments?
 
I don’t mean to impugn your justice but why does god love
sinners like you more than sinners like me?
 
I don’t mean to question your motives but why does accepting
your religion put me and mine under you and yours?
 
I don’t mean to sound bitter but why is there no room for me
in the land, the neighborhood, your family, your heart?
 
I don’t mean to dislike your god of grace but why gift
the one truth to you and leave others in damning ignorance?
 
I don’t mean to be impertinent but how come god welcomes
prayer in any language but only English can be spoken here?
 
I don’t mean to be skeptical about the universality
of your religion but why do I have to amputate my culture
but you get to keep yours?
 
I don’t mean to be in your face but why can’t you see me?

I don’t mean to speak so loudly but why can’t you hear me?

I don’t mean to doubt your faith but
            why doesn’t it make you good to me?

Click here to order a copy of Z is for Zapatazo today!

Atmosphere Press is an independent, full-service publisher. Click here to learn more.

​Ruben Rivera is Emeritus VP for DE&I and Associate Professor of History at Bethel University in Saint Paul, MN. He lives in Minneapolis with his wife Anita. Although his poetry has won awards in various contests, Z is for Zapatazo is Ruben’s first published collection.

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.

                                "Jesucristo Santifícanos"

I can hear the eternal mumbling
Of el Rosario
In the other room.
And I am alone in the living room
With dirty blue walls.
More alone than my first day of School,
Where I sat in the aisles
Looking at a woman
I didn’t understand
‘Cuz she was a gringa
And I am a wetback child.  And I
Hated her and her sick colored skin.
I hated all the kids who didn’t
Know what I was saying.  I hated how
They stood up.  Looked at the Cloth
With bright red and blue and put
Their hands over their hearts.
Mumbled on and on like my Abuelita, when
She runs all the words together
From el Rosario.
 
The gringa’s eyes were full and new.
Not like Your eyes that are
Dying colors.
And You!
You didn’t help me!  And now You’re
Looking at me with those blue eyes
Like all those dumb kids who didn’t know
When I said hello.
You know everything, and theydidn’tknownothing
¡No me mires con esos pinches ojos!
‘Cuz you’re looking at me like
I’m no good
‘Cuz you know my Dad’s a mojado
And I can’t mumble the way they do
When they stand
So tall
To pray

"Red Wine, Roque"

Roque
You taught me
Red wine
Was close to a
Lonely
Morning
Orgasm
 
A poem set on the
Moon.
 
A revolution
Set in my
Soul.

​MARIA J. ESTRADA is an English college professor of Composition, Literature, and her favorite, Creative Writing. She also runs her union chapter with amor and pride. She grew up in the desert outside of Yuma, Arizona in the real Barrio de Los Locos, a barrio comprised of new Mexican immigrants and first-generation Chicanos. Drawing from this setting and experiences, she writes like a loca every minute she can—all while magically balancing her work and union and family obligations. She lives in Chicago’s south side with her wonderfully supportive husband, two remarkable children, and two mischievous cats—one of whom has killed at least one laptop. You can learn more about her writing happenings and favorite books on her YouTube channel Radical Books and Politics.
 
She is Founder and Editor-in-Chief at Barrio Blues Press. 

Breve historia de un grito
 
Trescientos años después 
de la conquista se alzó el grito 
de dolores, grito de un pueblo
adolorido por independencia
del imperio. Veinte y unos años
después de ser independiente 
México perdió mas de la mitad 
de sus tierras al más joven 
impero del norte.
Y expulsando otra invasión
y sufridas otras tiranías
se hizo por revolución el grito
dolorido. De eso hace cien
y más años. ¿Qué puede decir 
una historia del hambre, la sed,
el dolor, la pena, el sufrir 
de la que se hace?
La injusticia echa raíces muy largas. 
Deshacerse de un yugo no es ser
libre, deshacerse de un yugo no es
lo mismo que lograr la justicia.
La lucha sigue. Pues ¡adelante!
mexican@s, chican@s, adelante mundo. 
La lucha sigue hasta la justicia.
¡Hasta la justicia sigue la lucha!

© Rafael Jesús González 2021
(Somos en escrito, septiembre 2021; derechos reservados del autor)

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/. 

THE FALL OF KABUL
 
carpet-baggers locusts cannibals lice
the head turns to stone the moon is drawn
out of its well and decapitated in a dust flurry
minutes before the evacuation promises of
paper-flowers fruit without vermin bread !
for two decades a series of statues come and gone
artillery composed of offal and headwinds
ox-carts bearing sultans of medieval dialects
everything a matter of renunciation
movies cosmetics opium military footwear
the greatest Demon in the world has just
surrendered his vices in a big photograph swap
history is written on mattresses with bedbugs
remember the Soviet carrion ?
remember the big Buddha at Bamian ?
five thousand years since the Aryans bruited
the Vedas in the Hindu Kush and today
nothing but a reversal of system and value
blond poster-girls peeling off bloodied walls
hoodwinked soldier boys from Iowa City
haunted by the part they played
dismembering the carcass of progressive Reform
Jihad ! Mujahideen ! turn the volume up !
the Twin Towers were destroyed by fireflies
a nuisance of idioms and heresy
monstrous illiteracy of social media lies
verbiage and tattooed air multiples of Zero
Balkh the birthplace of Rumi surrenders !
President of USA suffers from PTSD
a painted screen a flutter of Chinese diplomats
wearing poisoned masks an x-ray of Night
what good are stealth bombers and drones ?
red ants versus black ants ! civilization !
mendacity of General Petraeus and the CIA
operatives who drill like moles through earth
nothing is solid and even less is holy
the Beloved ! houris wearing burkas on Main Street
Yea this day is Paradise and Gehenna
above and below and forever !
 
08-15-21

​​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.

José E. Valdivia Heredia is an undergraduate student of Religion and Latin American studies at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania. They are a Chicanx writer from Northern California born to two parents from Michoacán, México. José has published a short poem in the Harvard Latinx literary publication Palabritas. 

Today I take back my birth right
 
without fear or hesitation.
 
You, who believe you have as much right to deny me my heritage like conquistadores in foreign ships.
 
Yo soy Boricua! Aunque no lo sepas!
 
Yo soy Boricua! Aunque tu me niegas!
 
I know how it drives you insane, that my Spanish sounds like heresy.
 
Do you not recognize your own brother?
 
I am the product of our mother’s violation, the bastard son of history, the crumbs that the mainland left behind! I am the echo of our past!
 
And I see you. I see through you. You foam at the mouth, ready to spit rejection into my face.
 
As I speak, I see your lips curling like bows taking aim at my chest. Your tongues are pitchforks starving for blood. Your words are salt encrusted and stink of vinegar left to dry.
 
Your fingers slowly creep, crawl, and wrap themselves around stones. Accusing me of adultery, pharisees of my flag.
 
Me acusan de traición!
 
Me han dicho que abandone mi patria!
 
Por no estar sufriendo con ella! Luchando por ella!
 
Accuse me of poverty instead!
 
Accuse me of loving a family I could not provide for! As if being Puerto Rican eight thousand miles away from home was not suffering enough.
 
As if representing our pride and defending our honor to those who believe we have none left isn’t enough of a fight!
 
But I see that your eyes still speak silence and rejection.
 
Sin embargo, I know who I am and where I am from.
 
Yo soy el jíbaro triste, migrando a la cuidad de Nueva York.
 
I am the sleepless nights in the heartless jungles of concrete and traffic.
 
I am the desperation of the immigrant.
 
I am the weeping eyes of mothers praying for their sons.
 
I am all of their “Hail Mary’s” and “Padre Nuestro”.
 
I am the uncertainty of choice. To leave or to stay?
 
To leave.
 
And pack your whole life inside a bag of luggage…
 
 
I am the isolation of our single star.
 
Quiet seed of the Caribbean.
 
It wants to scream out from beneath the earth, to be acknowledged by the world.
 
We are taught that injustice is our daily bread. To be thankful that we are not like other Latin countries, “republicas hambrientas”
 
Justice is too much to thirst for, because “no estamos listos para la soberanía.”
 
As if freedom is something we must learn, as if it wasn’t already seared into the very skin of our souls when we are born! As if it wasn’t already carved into our bones and written in verse within our hearts!
 
Tell me, do you think we felt loved when the President threw paper towels at us when there was more blood running in the island than water?
 
Neither did I.
 
I am Judas, who betrayed himself and sold his flesh for thirty pieces of silver and a loaf of bread to give to his mother. 
 
You would have me crucified for being born into the same skin as you.
 
The sound of my rolling r’s is flat and deformed, my skin is a shade of American to you, but I will never be what you want me to be.
 
I will not confess to crimes I did not commit.
 
Because you cannot abandon a home,
 
 
that has never left your heart…
 
 
Y confieso con mi cantico triste,
 
Yo soy Boricua, aunque no lo sepas.
 
Yo soy Boricua, aunque tu me niegas.

Pilgrim
​
See, some were born to summer homes
And palatial groves
Where pain was only to ever unfold
From the pages of Secret Gardens
Where the Red Fern Grows
But not I
See, I come from the stock
Of starry-eyed astronauts
Who greet the night sky
With big dreams and wide eyes
Always Running
Down the Devil’s Highway
Through Occupied America
On the way back to
The House on Mango Street
And all those other books
You didn’t want us to read
Raised on handball
Off the back wall
Of a panaderia
Born
East the river
Post Mendez vs Westminster
One generation removed
From the redlines
And diplomas signed
That those dreams
In that skin
Need not apply
See, I come from struggle
And if my story offends you
That is only ‘cause you made the mistake of seeking your
reflection
In my self-portrait
See, this
Well this may not be about you
Because while some were born
To the common core
Whose reflected faces
Graced the pages
Of doctrines to discover
And ages to be explored
Where old world hardships
Crashed against new shores
New England
New Hampshire
New Jersey
New York
For others pushed off
Turtle island
Aztlan
Do not call this brown skin immigrant
Child of the sun
Son of the conquest
Mexicano blood
Running through the veins
Of the eastside of Los Angeles
Do not tell him
In what native tongue
His song would best be sung
Do not tell me
Who I am
‘Cause I was raised just like you
Miseducated in some of those
Very same schools
Off lessons and legends
Of honest injuns and Christian pilgrims
And a nation of immigrants
All united in freedom
That is until they pulled aside
My white friend
Pointed directly at me
And said “Scott
I judge you by the company you keep
And you spend your time with this”
And that’s the same old story since 1846
The adventures of Uncle Sam
The stick-up man
Hey wetback
Show me your papers
Now give me your labor
The Melting Pot
Was never meant for the hands
That clean it
The American dream
Has always come at the expense
Of those who tucked it in
And you don’t know that
‘Cause you don’t teach it
Could write you a book
But you won’t read it
So you know what
This is about you
And 1492
And the treaty of Guadalupe
California missions
And Arizona schools
And these racists
That try to erase us
As we raise their kids
In cities that bear our names
But you’re going to learn
Something today
‘Cause from Ferdinand
To minuteman
From Arpaio
To Alamo
From Popol Vuh
To Yo Soy Joaquin
To the Indian that still lives in me
From Mexico 68
To the missing 43
They tried to bury us
They didn’t know we were seeds
From Cananea mine
To Delano strike
From the Plan De Ayala
Emiliano Zapata
Joaquin Murrieta
Las Adelitas
Brown Berets
And Zapatistas
From Richard Nixon
To the Third Napoleon
From Peckinpah
To Houston
From Lone Star Republic
To Christopher Columbus
All the way down
To Donald fucking Trump
We didn’t cross the borders
The borders crossed us
Who you calling immigrant
Pilgrim?

Carved Over
​
Draw a map
Line the sand
Carve the desert
Act on land
Amend it
Eminent domain
Indefinite detention
Private prisons
Public referendum
Gentrification
Naturalization
Americanization
Forced sterilization
Make America Great Again
Mexico will pay
The hunt for Murrieta
The hunt for Pancho Villa
John Pershing’s slaughter of the innocents
A severed head
Touring California museums
Becomes Zorro
Becomes the Wild Bunch
Becomes whitewash
This American Life
Experience
Its imagination
If you can dream it
You can see it
And if you can see it
You can build it
And if you build it
You can take it
And if they resist
Manifest a cruelty
So complete
That for generations
They will do it to themselves
Build a city
Draw its borders
Patrol its districts
Add silence to injury
Insult without memory
Protect these borders
From language and culture
Taco trucks
And Dora the Explorer
The country is changing
And you know it
It’s simple mathematics
And you know it
You have kept us weak
By keeping us confused
Your grandchildren
Will speak Spanglish
In the neighborhood
You grew up in
Greeting their friends
On the corner
Of your childhood
And cherished memories
Under the lamplight
And faded midst
This historic site
Of your first kiss
Where you learned
To sink
Before you learned to swim
Where you
And she
Carved your names to trees
And promised each other
Forever
But
Memories fade
Neighborhoods change
And your names will be carved over
And there is nothing
You can do about it
And you know this too
So when Donald Trump
Says drug dealers and rapists
And Kelly Osbourne jumps in
To correct him
No Donald
Those people are just here to clean our shit
When you
Sit so comfortably
Speak so freely
About a group of people
Who are somehow everywhere
Yet at the same time
No one
Hold your tongue
We are far closer than you know

​Review by Scott Duncan-Fernandez
​
​
We Chicanos still need words to express our occupied experience even after 173 years. Mowing Leaves of Grass by Matt Sedillo has those words, slings out the curses to whomever has it coming. That necessary verbal retaliation of humanity that brown bodies and minds need. Social justice and history books are great, but we live in and by poetry.
​
I’m a Xicano, these words are for me, speak for me. I am impressed how much work Chicano art accomplishes: our art is functional. Sedillo’s Mowing Leaves of Grass lives up to this. You may find yourself in the work, in this too personal political experience of being Xicano in America, or you may come to understand the experience better as fellow human beings.

I’ve lived the poem, “A Chicano in Liverpool,” when the poet is asked do you belong here, though as a Chicano in Brighton, UK. My family and I have been, “Carved Over,” contended with fantasies about us and told we don’t belong in our homeland.
I’m sure many folks have commented on the title, Mowing Leaves of Grass, a reference to Mr. Body Electric. I liked studying him in high school and college, but never forgot what soured the milk: Whitman’s excitable thoughts that the Mexican-American War would be the fulfillment of Anglo superiority. In this education system we Chicanos are often forced to study and agree wholeheartedly with statements, literary works, and famous authors that advocate for our troglodyte inherency to servitude or how we are better off dead.

For all his exalting of the body electric, WW ain’t talking about my brown body or African bodies. White bodies need only apply for the full body kung fu glow in his world. Of course, they didn’t teach his thoughts on the matter in high school or college. The American school system likes to sanitize and exculpate northern Europeans, call slaves workers, say the land was empty and just waiting for development, that Mexicans were too lazy here in the underpopulated and underfunded frontier to get anything done. What more proof of this white supremacy than the current Texas Legislature’s further attempt to whitewash history and combat the truth of black and brown humanity and that the system built on us is oppressive and wrong.

I’m quite okay with Whitman getting mowed along with much of the American literary canon, the Anglocentric selection of works that academia advertises and empowers by its own authority.

Mowing Leaves of Grass is a cry against the American experience and for the Indigenous American, one often we Chicanos must steal back as our detractors use the earlier marks of Spanish conquest against us, or make exploitative tourist fantasies of us, as mentioned in “Carved Over.” This poem is a mental overthrow of the USA’s colonial idea of us as foreigners which is accomplished as well in the poem, “Pilgrim.” This poem “Pilgrim” was read at the first Aztlán Report, a state of the raza yearly event started this year in 2021. The Aztlán Report was a gathering of Chicano organizations to inform about the events and activities of the year pertinent the Mexican American experience. I attended as a member of MeXicanos 2070, a non-profit Chicano organization dedicated to protecting and enhancing our culture. A perfect setting for this counter colonial poem.

These poems come from a year ago, el tiempo de naranja, the time of Trump. Sedillo cusses Trump, cusses his followers. Points out that we Xicanos are the future.  Mowing Leaves of Grass, the book and the titular poem is mowing the canon, decolonizing the mind of education, American education. At times, it hits the same note, the note of resistance, but we are offered some poems like “La Reina,” where it’s a celebration of women who have persevered and transmitted culture, like my birth city of LA itself. 

We need more than witnessing to provide trauma porn for salivating masters, or equally legless rage to amuse them.  We don’t have anger issues, we got reasons to be angry. We need that emotion and reason, the chants and incantation in this collection that will heal and forge us. We need to be out of control and have un-colonial thoughts.

We deserve our anger; we need to express it. I needed these words when cops approached me as a teenager, guns on me, asked, are you a wetback? and slammed me against my car. I just knew “Fuck Tha Police” by NWA back then.  Now I have the poem, “Custers.” Mowing Leaves of Grass has many stanzas expressing the “ya bastas,” “nada mas,” “best back ups” that Chicanos need.

These poems are angry. I am angry. As I write this, Mario Gonzales is dead, murdered by cops, called on by neighbors for being tall and brown in a public park. He had long hair, the caller said; he looked “Hispanic” or “Indian.” The words describe Mario, me, and the poet. These poems can’t not be personal.

I want everyone to read this. It’s poetry for now, but not limited to it. Mow the canon, celebrate the Xicano electric or find the new words we are on the cusp of speaking thanks to fearless poetry like Sedillo’s.

“Go defend our country son make Uncle Sam proud.
Don’t worry about a High School Diploma,
You’ve got the Viet Cong to think about.
 
You’ll be physically fit, cock strong, in your dress blues
All these westside chicks are gonna want to fuck you
 
You’ll have medals pinned on your chest, a career as a cook or custodian
Benefits with a steady paycheck, a cheap little house with an iron fence
 
C’mon be a real man with a rifle in your hands
And tell them all, later on, about the young heroes of war
Jungle sounds, Khe San and how things were in’ Nam.

 Vietnamese rats
Chasing like rabid dogs
So large you couldn’t swallow
Shooting women
And children
Coming back
To be a Little League coach
For your kids-
A hero?
A patriot?
 
Wearing a red and gold cover
That reads:
             1967-1969 Reconnaissance USMC
Raising a Devil Dog flag in the front yard
Next to an American flag.
                                                          Everyone driving by knows where you stand.
                                                     Who you are
                                         A Veterano
                                        What you did
                           For this country
                  That is not yours
              A dream you’re not in.

is physically fit,
says OORAH when they see another marine,
has American pride,
honors the eagle, globe and anchor,
has a bulldog named Chesty,
tells war stories,
while polishing his medals,
banks with USAA,
psycho tough,
ready to kill,
never hesitates,
knows martial arts like Chuck Norris,
is an alcoholic with a side chick,
has PTSD,
a racist in denial,
attends air shows with the silent drill platoon.
 
A real marine says
this country has gone to shit,
doesn’t want to die,
because their grandson is gay,
on the flip,
he wants gays in the military to serve as bullet-catchers.
 
A real marine gets shafted by the corps,
years later,
thankless service,
wearing a red cover,
USMC t-shirt,
won’t stop until the job is done,
flashbacks,
hates Asians,
haircut high n’ tight,
originally from Parris Island,
is sometimes a tio taco,
not that amphibious,
a cock boy in dress uniform,
marching at grocery stores.
 
A real marine trains people of color to kill people of color.
A United States fucking Marine,
trained to kill anyone,
anything,
even himself.
 
I didn’t go to war.