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. 

ADELA NAJARRO

THE POET: IN HER OWN WORDS
​
I was born in San Francisco, and then around the age of four or five we moved to the Los Angeles area. We lived in many L.A. suburbs, Downey, Pico Rivera, Cerritos, and Torrance. We moved around a lot. I went to a different school almost every year. I learned to adapt and understand U.S. suburban culture. I also learned how all fluctuates and is indeterminate. 

My love of writing and ability to play between two languages arose from the randomness of my childhood. My early years were filled with what can best be termed chaotic love, and so I came to understand how the world is not set in one place, language, or mode of seeing, which just happens to be the perfect upbringing for a poet in a post-modern world! I have done a lot of inner work analyzing and articulating my childhood. My family, my memories, mi pasado, fuel my poems, though perhaps not directly in a one-to-one translated narrative. 

My early memories focus on my father. In one, he is carrying me from the car to the house. My head rests on his shoulder and I have my arms wrapped around his neck. We lived in San Francisco, at the time. We are going up the stairs to the door. In the other, I am in the same doorway, and someone asks my name. I reply “Adelita.” He tells me that my name is Adela and that Adelita is a term of endearment used in the family. Of course, he didn’t use those words since I must have been around four years old and this would have taken place in Spanish. I also have a memory of standing at the top of a street in San Francisco and looking down. I fear falling. 

My parents and grandparents were born in Nicaragua. Some of my cousins were born here in the U.S. while others were born in Nicaragua. Nearly all family members are now living in the United States. I’m sure there are a few distant cousins in Nicaragua. I don’t know them, but I would like to. Instead, what I do is travel to Nicaragua through my imagination—what was Nicaragua like for my mother, my father, mis abuelas? I love to imagine los pericos in the tropical rainforest and iguanas sunbathing in the branches of barren trees.
 
I have always written. I have memories of writing poems in elementary school. I write to understand my place in the world

THE POET'S BIO
​
Adela Najarro is the author of three poetry collections: Split Geography, Twice Told Over and My Childrens, a chapbook that includes teaching resources. With My Childrens she hopes to bring Latinx poetry into the high school and college classroom so that students can explore poetry, identity, and what it means to be a person of color in US society. Her extended family’s emigration from Nicaragua to San Francisco began in the 1940’s and concluded in the eighties when the last of the family settled in the Los Angeles area.

She currently teaches creative writing, literature, and composition at Cabrillo College, and is the English instructor for the Puente Project, a program designed to support Latinidad in all its aspects, while preparing community college students to transfer to four-year colleges and universities. Every spring semester, she teaches a “Poetry for the People,” workshop at Cabrillo College where students explore personal voice and social justice through poetry and spoken word.

She holds a doctorate in literature and creative writing from Western Michigan University, as well as an M.F.A. from Vermont College, and is widely published in numerous anthologies and literary magazines. Her poetry appears in the University of Arizona Press anthology The Wind Shifts: New Latino Poetry, and she has published poems in numerous journals, including Porter Gulch Review, Acentos Review, BorderSenses, Feminist Studies, Puerto del Sol, Nimrod International Journal of Poetry & Prose, Notre Dame Review, Blue Mesa Review, Crab Orchard Review, and elsewhere.

POEMS FROM TWICE TOLD OVER​​

Early Morning Chat with God

​This morning I’m back to asking for patience.
With my cup of coffee I sit outside to say hello
to you God, my Jiminy Cricket, my salsa
dancing quick-with-a-dip amigo. We have
a very collegial relationship. I laugh
at all your jokes and praise the wonders
of a sky’s watercolors. I know you like me,
a benign affection and tolerance as I run
around like a chicken with its head cut off,
a truly gruesome image, nevertheless
hilarious like a grisly cartoon. The blood spurting.
The body winding down to zero. The crashing
into unforeseen objects. I think if I
were back on my great-grandmother’s farm,
the farm that I know only through stories
my mother tells of Nicaragua, Bluefields,
a tortilla filled with just enough, and I saw
the long scrawny neck and the axe,
I would be sick to my stomach: the aimlessness
of her final strut, the reality of blood
loss, her claws scratching the dirt, kicking up rocks,
a panic. But when she stops, into the pot
she goes. A meal, what we need to continue,
her flesh simmered off the bone. Truly delicious
in a tomato sauce flavored with green peppers
and onions. Transformation. The feathers
plucked, soil and dust washed away. The table set.
Goblets of red wine, white china plates,
a cast iron pot twirling a bay leaf
scented steam. Then a prayer and gratitude
that we have enough to make it through
another night alone, a night filled with longing
whispers and the turbulence of dreams.

​​Between Two Languages

Misericordia translates to mercy,
as in God have mercy on our souls.
Ten piedad, pity us the poor and suffering,
the lost and broken. Have mercy. Ten piedad.
Misericordia, a compassionate
forgiveness, carries within
miseria, misery, the stifled cry
on a midnight bus to nowhere,
and yes, the hunger, a starless night’s
piercing howl, the shadows within shadows
under a freeway overpass, the rage
that God might be laughing, or even
worse, silent, gone, a passing hallucination.
Our nerve-wracked bodies tremble.
Our eyes have trouble peering into night.
Let us hope for more than can possibly be.
Señor, ten misericordia de nosotros.
And if we are made in the image of God,
then we can begin heading toward
the ultimate zero, the void
that is not empty, forgive ourselves,
and remember the three
seconds when we caught a glimpse
of someone else’s stifling cry.
Compassion, then miseria, our own
misery intensified by the discordant
ringing of some other life. Our ultimate
separation. Our bodies intolerably
unable to halt the cacophonous
clamor of unanswered prayers.
But nevertheless we must try
for no reason at all. Once more,
Señor, ten misericordia de nosotros,
forgive us for what we cannot do.

Redlands

I'm coming to the conclusion that I'm simple,
like my mother, my grandmother, father. All of them
from Nicaragua where time goes back further.
Here, wagons and rifles, the prairie plowed
 
into fields of soybeans and sunflowers. Sunken wood
barns and tombstones rattle as a six-by-six tractor-trailer
rumbles through exit 41a and on past peach cobbler,
a shot of Jim Beam Whiskey, and the Stop'n'Go, 7-11,
 
Circle K, whatever name on that one corner, in that one
place, where someone calls the intersection of a convenience store
and a gas station their town, their home, their grass. Paint or
aluminum siding. A kitchen and carpet. Photos
 
of Aunt Edna and Uncle Charlie. That summer Chuck
went for a ride on a Harley under redwoods and past
cool stream shadows while Julie, as little girl, slept
in a Ford station wagon. Faded blue. Wood paneling
 
peeling open to rust. The back flipped down
for her and Ursa Major poured out sky.
 
*
 
In Nicaragua the colors are electric water in air.
The weight of clouds on winged cockroaches
and crocodiles in streams. La Virgen de Guadalupe. My cousin,
Maria Guadalupe Sanchez, on a bike with Brenda through
 
a suburb of Managua on the handlebars. The streets
were Miguel, her brother, with a rifle shooting iguanas
from a tree in a pickup or Jeep. The huge overbearing
green of myriad plants inching their way past
 
monkeys and chickens to a patio whitewashed
and cool. The distance away from grandmother. Actually
great-grandmother and her son, the witch doctor
who could stop malaria with powder or a gaze
 
into trembling hearts. The known ancient crossing 
to psychology, biology, chemistry. The workings
of ourselves. A railroad blasted through mountain.
 
*
 
I want to dance during the Verbenas. I don't know the word
or correct spelling. V or a B? Just a sound from a one-time visit
to Nicaragua. A celebration. A truck lined with palm fronds
in a parade, then dancing. At three in the morning,
 
it was still warm. Verbenas. An old colonial colonel's name?
A street? A time to celebrate the harvest of bananas, yucca,
corn, beans? I don't know. There was a monkey on a leash,
on the roof. The tiles curved from Tía Teresa and Tío Rafael
 
to me being pretty sitting at a table with my first rum and coke.
The loss of my virginity was to be a golden icon mined
from history where my grandfather was a child hidden
under a loose brown skirt and delivered to a convent. Mi abuelita
 
with her eight kids. My aunts and uncles. My mother with us.
In college with Philip, a boy standing naked looking out
a window, his butt prettier than mine, it was California.
There were palm trees. I was correctly 18. I had gone to visit
 
Planned Parenthood. The ladies behind a desk were asking
questions and taking notes. With a brown paper bag
I waited on grass, in the park, knowing already Interstate 80
divides this nation in two, beginning in San Francisco
 
cutting straight through to New Jersey on the Atlantic Coast. 

IN CONVERSATION: ADELA NAJARRO (AN) AND LUCHA CORPI (LC) 

LC: Adela, I have enjoyed listening to you read some of your poems a few times. Mostly, when we happened to coincide at meetings and readings sponsored by Escritores del nuevo sol in  Sacramento and Círculo de poetas and Writers in Oakland. It’s been a treat every time. But quite a double and triple treat now to read and reread your exquisite poetry in solitude, as I prepare for our charla here today.  And I am in awe, not just for this pleasure of hearing and reading your poetry. I have also had the opportunity to see you organize public events with an ease that never ceases to amaze me. Also because reading your biographical material I realize that you are a wife, mother, indefatigable professor, community organizer, a “dynamo” poet… and so much more.
 
Above, in your biographical information of your early years, you close your narrative with a line that immediately held my attention: “I write to understand my place in the world.” Could you elaborate?
 
AN: That arises from the idea that poetry is discovery. A rant, a diatribe, a polemic , all make statements about what is already known. The rant is yelling, screaming, crying on the page over events that have happened; the diatribe is an attack; the polemic tries to convince through astute argument. All of these begin from a standpoint of knowing, knowing how one has been wronged, knowing the wrong itself, and knowing how to correct and proceed. That’s not poetry. Poetry has to begin with an open mind that follows language into a discovery or truth. It is through writing that I discover the truth of what surrounds me, in the past, the present, and even in the future; in that sense I come to understand my place in the world.

I have no fear. If the truth I find is one of betrayal, hatred, violence, anger, then that is a part of the world I live in. Even so, it surprises me over and over, how writing always takes me to hope. Even when I write about issues that have broken others or myself, I always find beauty. Maybe it’s about being alive, being able to breathe, being able to wake up one more day. Praise God and sing Hallelujah! Poetry and religion merge onto the same roadway in that they both seek the human spirit and lead us to compassion, again, our place in the world.
 
LC: In “Redlands, California,” you tell the story of living in the United States while imaging life in Nicaragua. Could you talk about the context you had in mind when you imagine a homeland, Nicaragua, that you don’t know since you grew up in the United States?
 
AN: My brain developed a duality of language and culture as I grew up. I learned English in pre-school while my first language was Spanish. I was living in U.S. Anglo culture while at home it was all about Nicaragua. So—"Los dos fit better than one alone.” That’s my line from “Conversation with Rubén Darío's ‘Eco y yo’,” which was first published in Nimrod International Journal of Poetry & Prose and appears in my collection, Twice Told Over.

Los dos. I view myself in terms of Whitman and Anzaldúa in that I contain multitudes in my mestizaje. I seek an American literary tradition that contains the Anglo, the male, the Latinx, female, and all the range between. There is no set answer, just the flux of words, our thoughts, the daily wakening to a new day that somehow seems old and familiar.

“Redlands, California,” has three sections, the first is about life in the States; in the second, I imagine life in Nicaragua; the final section tries to create a new juxtaposition between these two states of being, and, of course, it ties in with sex because what else captures the union of two distinct bodies?

The Nicaragua I know is the Nicaragua of my imagination and that of the stories told by my parents, abuelitas, cousins, tías y tíos. I tell and retell their stories to bring them into the literary conversation of the Americas. They matter. They are part of the American story. As a writer it falls to me to create poems that capture this duality of language, culture, immigration, las penas and the joy.
 
LC:  Tell us what you will about your creative process. Do you sit down to write at certain times of the day on certain days? What happens if you get inspired while driving or in other similar situations? Do you memorize the lines for the time you finally write the poem where they belong? Or hope for the best?
 
AN: There was a time when I wrote nearly non-stop. I remember being at a job training and writing a poem. I have written poems on napkins. I have written using big orange markers. I feared that if I stopped writing, then the Muse or inspiration would vanish. But it never has. As I accepted that writing was part of my identity, of who I am, and what makes Adela, Adela, I took a couple of days off. Then I wrote about those days. Then I took a few more days off, then wrote new poems. Eventually, I realized that my mind collects ideas, images, language, every waking and sleeping moment. When I sit down to write, it comes out. Then the work becomes revision. Editing. Cutting that which doesn’t belong and expanding that which is hidden, all the while finding the exact words and rhythms. Doesn’t that sound like joy? It is to me. When I write, I am at one with everything. I accept whatever shows up. The pain, the horror, the laughter, the jokes, the image. Right now there is an owl in the eucalyptus tree outside my bedroom patio. Earlier coyotes were howling at sirens, not the moon, but sirens. Someone on their way to a hospital. Tomorrow, a mint leaf will open in a pot. There are spiders in the eaves. Every waking moment holds something and then the world of dreams, the imagination, the possibilities. Here are the final lines to “Conversation with Rubén Darío's ‘Eco y yo’”:
 
Out of the delirium,
the sweat, the anxiety of every morning,
we weave a soft and tender sea,
 
the mermaids, the song,
 
the possibility,
 
and all begins again.

*** 

Thank you Lucha for this conversation. It is always such a pleasure to see you and collaborate! Hasta la proxíma.
 
Mil gracias, Adela.
 
​
© Adela Najarro: the poems that appear in this interview are from Twice Told Over, published by Unsolicited Press, 2015, with permission of the author.
More information about Adela can be found at her website: 
www.adelanajarro.com.

​Erasure of a Teenage Daughter’s Letter to Her Deported Mother
 
Mom,
 
It’s been a long time since                                          .
I           think                      how long                          
      photo album we made                             that summer.
Do you                  the copy I gave you?
Or did they take it              too? I still have mine.
some of                       are torn --
I couldn’t stop             shaking hands from   
the afternoon you left.
 
One photo                   is whole —                  we hold hands
at the peak of that North Carolina mountain, out of breath
and trembling;                   wind shoves our clothes against skin, but
we ground our feet on                         soil beneath us and
refuse to fall.  I wonder if we could have                           .
 
Maybe you wouldn’t                           other side
of a man-made border. Maybe I wouldn’t                     vomit
questions on                crumpled paper:
Did the air           different when you crossed               ?
Did you feel      future                        ,                                   ,
and                                  slip out of your hands?
Did you even notice                your foot crossed south? 
Are you                       less          an outsider back there?
Or                    still a traitor that tried              
and failed? 
 
Love,

Karen Gonzalez-Videla is an undergraduate student at the University of South Florida. She is currently pursuing a Bachelor’s Degree in Psychology and Creative Writing, and she loves combining these two passions in her fiction. Although she writes about a variety of subjects, she focuses mostly on the immigrant experience and the exploration of one’s womanhood. She has upcoming work at Sidereal Magazine, Ghost Parachute, and Vita Brevis Press. 

Commentary/comentario por/by Lucha Corpi
  
9.

Es el dolor de un pueblo
el que se desliza en
la sangre de la tierra.

Acantilados bermejos
contienen la angustia
y las rítmicas palpitaciones.

La gente murmura en las
doradas esquinas de la ciudad,
se desliza la esperanza
con sutileza acuática.

¿dónde están los héroes del agua?
¿dónde las mujeres pez que cantan en la aurora?
¿dónde las ilusiones del nuevo amanecer?

Todo se inunda.

Escurre la lluvia
en los cristales,
de los acantilados
brota el agua densa.

Canta, mujer pez, canta.
​

​9.

It is the people’s pain
sneaking into
the blood of the land.

Crimson cliffs
contain the anguish
and rhythmic palpitations.

People murmur in the
golden corners of the city,
hope slips away
with aquatic subtlety.

where are the heroes of the water?
where the fish women and their song of first light?
where the illusions of the new dawn?

Everything becomes flooded.

Rain drips
down window panes,
dense water sprouts
from cliffs.

Sing, fish woman, sing.


12.

Hay corrientes
que llevan el silencio
entre sus densas aguas.

Hudson de caudales de azogue.

Afuera el ruido que dejan
las aves transitorias.

La luz rompe las nubes,
relámpago que se entierra
en las frondas.

Trueno apasionado,
el agua y el viento
escarifican la piel de la tierra.

Sangra el silencio,
el agua corre y la tierra
pulsa contenidos deseos.

​12.


There are currents
that transport silence
amid their dense waters.

Hudson of quicksilver fluidity.

Outside the noise left by
transitory birds.

Light shatters the clouds,
lightning bolt buried
in the foliage.

Impassioned thunder,
water and wind
lacerate the flesh of the land.

Silence bleeds,
water flows and the land
pulsates restrained desires.


34.

Medita en este navegar mecánico.

No queda nada,
solo el angustiante ulular
del viento antes
de llegar al agua. 

Tiemblan las suaves manos
al escribir, son las dueñas de
los pensamientos salvajes,
de la ira de los oprimidos.

Agua del Hudson:
despierta y desenraiza
el dolor: las pesadillas
de niñez que se hacen realidad.



34.

Meditate in this mechanical navigation.

Nothing remains,
only the agonized keening
of the wind before
it reaches the water. 

Soft hands tremble
as they write, they possess
fierce thoughts,
the fury of the oppressed.

Water of the Hudson:
awake and uproot
the pain: the nightmares
of childhood that become reality.

​Xánath Caraza is a traveler, educator, poet, and short story writer. She teaches at the University of Missouri-Kansas City.  She writes for Seattle Ecribe, La Bloga, The Smithsonian Latino Center, and Revista Literaria Monolito.  She is the Writer-in-Residence at Westchester Community College, New York since 2016.  Caraza was the recipient of the 2014 Beca Nebrija para Creadores, Universidad de Alcalá de Henares in Spain.  She was named number one of the 2013 Top Ten Latino Authors by LatinoStories.com. Her book of poetry Syllables of Wind / Sílabas de viento received the 2015 International Book Award for Poetry.  It also received Honorable Mention for best book of Poetry in Spanish in the 2015 International Latino Book Awards.  Her books of verse Lágrima roja, Without Preamble, Where the Light is Violet, Black Ink,Ocelocíhuatl, Conjuro and her book of short fiction What the Tide Brings have won national and international recognition.  Her other books of poetry are Hudson, Le sillabe del vento, Noche de colibríes,Corazón pintado, and her second short story collection, Metztli. Caraza has been translated into English, Italian, and Greek; and partially translated into Portuguese, Hindi, Turkish, Rumanian and Nahuatl. 

Hudson (Editorial Nazarí, 2018) por/by Xánath Caraza, traducido por/translated by Sandra Kingery

Comentario/Commentary
por/by  Lucha Corpi 


Xánath Caraza es y continuará siendo, sin duda, una de las voces poéticas más innovadoras en el idioma español.  Hudson, su nueva colección de poesía, es más que un viaje por un río que fluye e inevitablemente vierte sus aguas en el mar.  El río Hudson no es un río ordinario ya que sigue un curso doble.  Por lo tanto nuestro viaje comienza en el punto de su origen, un estuario—un habitante en flujo constante—donde nace y también se vacía en el mar, donde cohabitan las faunas de agua fresca y salada.  También fluye tierra adentro, provee rutas y caminos para la gente en las ciudades a lo largo de su cauce para también hacerlas prosperar.  Le da vida a otro río en el camino.  En el lecho del río Caraza escribe su “texto”—la historia del río, que es también la historia de la poeta.  Las tumultuosas corrientes-salinas-frescas de agua se convierten en el tempo de su torrente sanguíneo.  Guiados por los versos en negritas, incrustados en el texto, la poeta nos reta a buscar el espíritu del río—la belleza lírica.  Una tercera lectura de los versos en itálicas nos lleva a un nivel más profundo, a los cuestionamientos filosóficos y búsqueda de vida que Caraza se hace y que todos nosotros cuestionamos en algún momento.  He encontrado mucha riqueza en Hudson.  Todo accesible, para lectores angloparlantes, a través de la bella traducción hecha por Sandra Kingery.  Hudson es un libro que debe ser leído por poetas y amantes de la poesía—¡definitivamente por amantes de los ríos también!  Bravo.

Xánath Caraza is and will no doubt continue to be one of the most innovative poetic voices in the Spanish language. Hudson, her new poetry collection, is much more than a journey down any river that flows onward and inevitably empties its waters into a sea. TheHudson River is no ordinary river as it follows a dual course. So, our journey begins at the point of its origin, a tidal estuary—a habitat in constant flux—where the river begins and also empties into the sea, where salty and fresh water fauna cohabit. It also flows inland, providing routes and ways for people in cities along its course to prosper as well. It gives birth to another river along the way. On its riverbed, Caraza writes her “text”—the river’s story, which is also her story. The saline-fresh-water, restless currents become the tempo of her bloodstream.  Guided by the verses in bold lettering embedded in the text, the poet challenges us to seek the spirit of the river—the lyrical beauty. A third reading of verses in italics takes us deeper into the poet’s mind, into Caraza’s lifelong quest for answers to philosophical questions all of us ponder from time to time. So much more richness I have found in Hudson. All made accessible to an English-speaking readership by the beautifully crafted translations of Sandra Kingery.  Hudson is a must-read for poets and lovers of poetry—most definitely for lovers of rivers, too! Bravo.

Lucha Corpi, poeta y narradora/poet and writer
Oakland, CA, July/Julio de 2018

​Por/By Sylvia Eugenia

Meintren tegas a las botayas something something (we will live with the bottle until we die with the bottle.)
My mom had whiskey for the first time at nine; "tu flaca,” a Catholic martyr in the making in Managua. We had more in common that skin would tell.
“aww, who’s this cabvrona?!”
So, the conversation happens and my brain starts.
I could try to talk about my fathers’ fathers’ father in Syria, offer up some patriarchal evidence of who this body is made up of. I would be telling a blood truth; but, nothing in me exists attached to that country or custom or people. I could talk about kibby, silt-coffee, un-filtered cigarettes; what is to be a man. My primary leaned lesson from that truth was not talking about “it.” By “it,” I mean, anything, like, ever.
But, let's set aside a part of that part of skin steeped in side-stepping emotions and focus on the Pisces. By that, I mean, the woman. The female, the femme. The bruja of us. The emotional from us. I’ll conjour the grit of the saintly body that takes up the most space in me. My mother.
I will tell you about mi mama, deliver my cred. Mira, I am the “simberguensa” crying crocodile tears that will never, could never suffer enough or know what real suffering was like.
I’ll tell you about this potty mouth “chavala” that would cause my mother to gasp dramatically (inhale)
“Que vulgarite, que vulgar”
This is a story from the outside of an insider. Pero, an assimilated gordita. Por supuesto blanco, that is.
Que?!
I haven’t a clue
I speak Spanish poorly, comprehend it fairly and understand it from the warm rain coming through pores. I agonize over this, I abide by this, I lose myself. I instinctually, move forward with the cross.
My cross is only second hand but still holds like brand new. Thorns and nails are upkept to fashion my own contemporary guilt.
Self-torture and my ability to say words that I didn’t even know existed on my tongue.
“Aye dios” without a second thought” has turned into “aye dios; fuhckkkk”
A Central American mujer walks away to suffer in silence as the Middle Eastern man stays to have the final say.
Look at me, my everything “all nalgas peladas”
This is my body, mi corazon, for all to see.
Es mi vida.

​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.