SOMOS EN ESCRITO
  • HOME INICIO
  • ABOUT SOBRE
  • SUBMIT ENVIAR
  • Books
  • TIENDA
Picture

​
​​SOMOS EN ESCRITO
The Latino Literary Online Magazine

POETRY
​POESÍA

The sounds of her unpacking

8/30/2021

3 Comments

 
Picture
Photo by Scott Russell Duncan

Three Poems by Cesar Love

La Abeja
 
We know the buzz of her flying
but once she lands and stills her wings
she makes other sounds
the sounds of her unpacking
 
The pants of La Abeja have several pockets
She unpacks her pockets
at pachangas, parades
birthdays, weddings, cabalgatas
 
La Abeja makes her delivery
Her delivery of cultura:
New dances, first recipes, original games
Fresh jokes, bold accents, cool spellings
 
La Abeja arrives early and leaves late
She tastes every dish, she dances every song
 
Before she leaves the party
La Abeja refills her pockets
She stuffs them with cultura, poesía, canción
 
La Abeja flies south to the zocalos
North to the gazebos
East to the pagodas
West to the rodeos
 
To attract her, water your flowers
Water you poesía, water your canción.
La Cena
 
With every mouthful of your cod
My arms become fins
I am a fish cruising through oceans
Oceans so open
I swim as far as the moon
 
With every spoonful of your mango salsa
I grow body hair
I am a chango swinging across treetops`
Trees so high in the dusk
I dribble the setting sun
 
No dessert please
I too am cooked
I am a thin stalk of asparagus
Sizzling in a pan
Ecstatic in your oil
Vowels
 
I sing a vowel to the sky
A vowel of the land
My bare feet touch the earth
This jewel that holds me
That lets me stand
That lets me walk
I sing this vowel to the sky
 
I sing a vowel to mi gente
The vowel of mi familia
I learn this vowel from my bloodline
The comida shared
The luchas won
I sing this vowel to mi gente
 
I sing a vowel to my love
The vowel of ancient forests
A vowel as old as redwoods
As young as blossoms
This vowel bloomed when I met you
I sing this vowel to my love
Picture
​César Love is a Latinx poet living in San Francisco, California. He is the author of two books of poetry, While Bees Sleep and Birthright, and he is a co-editor of the Haight Ashbury Literary Journal. He recently published Baseball: An Astrological Sightline, an examination of astrology and baseball. His website is www.baseballastrology.com.

3 Comments

FLASHBACK: Lives, and deaths, by the roadside

6/18/2019

0 Comments

 
Picture

Poems, Iconic White Crosses, and Memories

First published on September 22, 2013, in Somos en escrito Magazine
By Sarah Cortez

Vanishing Points: Poems and Photographs of Texas Roadside Memorials, edited by poet Sarah Cortez, is a memorial in itself to the thousands of spontaneous roadside memorials, usually marked by small metal crosses, which line Texas highways. The prominent display of these iconic white crosses, some with accumulated mementoes, is often ignored by motorists.  
​
Yet these roadside memorials are invitations to pause, invitations to ponder the meaning of life and death. This volume of poems responds to these invitations with an array of stunning black and white photographs of these Texas roadside memorials accompanied by poems written by some of the state’s finest poets.
Picture
​Bro
That day you grabbed
the armadillo’s tail
and jerked it upside down
as it snarled and raked
air with black claws.

Remember?  All of us laughing
at the squirming, silver ball
of scaly, pissed-off critter
who’d thought he’d burrow
into safety when chased.

It’d be on that day—if
I could have you back—that
exact moment.  Your right arm
outstretched under scrub oak
alongside a one-lane road.

You, flushed, breathing hard,
sweaty—that instant suspended
the same as that armadillo
who’s now probably as dead as you,
alongside some other back road nearby.
 Faith
Picture
​By Sarah Cortez

But the sky, Nate, the big blue sky
crowns this cross so far above
both you and me that I get scared
just trying to think about it.  And
I promise you I still believe in God,
and I believe in His Only Son Jesus Christ,
and I believe in the Spirit sent down
upon us like the dewfall.  I believe, I
believe, I’ve always believed, but
I have a hole in my chest
where my heart loved you, and I
walk around like a clock without
a mechanism, and I’m not joking
when I say I’m dead too
now. Not just inside, the cold
blackness, but outside, and only,
and only this wind up high here
and the burning sun and
the million pesky grasshoppers buzzing
remind me that God’s ways
are so infinite and beyond,
so far above my mind, my pitiful
body, my heart-no-longer-there
that I’d just better go on
into whatever I have
left after losing you.  Not
that I know what
that is.  But there’s something.
There’s bound to be
something
worth living for.

Picture
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.
0 Comments

Poems from Beyond Time

2/6/2018

0 Comments

 
Picture

Poems in War and Love

By David Vela

​
Archangel


You deployed six times, I count them as such
Never mind the lingo and the requirements to define –
You fought in one of the nastiest of them – Fallujah -
Against Al Mahdi and his friends,

Yet you came back with all of your men.
You grew up in a town that might have been mine,
Except that yours was near rivers and mine
Was in the desert; You fought in the desert too,

Learned to love there, to be fully alive, sober to the threats,
To be kind to the populace. Then you fought at the ends
Of the earth, making friends all the way, even as you had
To remember to be lethal. A dog, you said, in that other

Country had come upon you and your forward man:
You were trained to slit its throat, You – dog-lover, rescuer of dreams,
Faithful man to your wife, whom you left and came home to
Twice. Dogs, yes, dogs you are faithful to, and this one did not bark.

So you did not have to slice and silence him with a knife,
And on that night you made your way back with relief
For sparing - at least- one more life. Archangel,
Sniper, man from the skies, friend for life.


≈≈≈≈≈≈≈

On the conquest of Raqqa

Mourn with your brother in war and Love, Alex,
And mourn for the Kurds who have declared
Like lions their autonomy. Mourn for the women
You miss, indescribable loss not to hold them                         
In your gaze and in your embrace.

Mourn the purpose they gave you, both ends
Combatants and warriors, women and culture,                       
Ancient, tested in fires from century to century.
Mourn, too, your brother and friend, who like
Odysseus and Gilgamesh, who like Aeneas

And Patrick Leigh Fermor had to voyage back to
Woman, society, and cultivation of mother earth;
Mourn them who had to sheathe the sword, put it beyond use
Back in the head and on the hearth - who always have it at the ready
In the heart, in the hand and in the mind

And in the memory of those you fought for, that sword
From beyond time, now and past and for the future.
Mourn them, mourn them all warrior, friend,
Poet, lover, son and brother.
Mourn, brother Andrew, mourn.

Mourn the man who blew up behind you
Spinning legs in the air were all you saw,
Yet you had to go forward and take the village
See the traps, the mines, burned out and blasted
Cinderblock of once-homes made sniper shot-watches.

Mourn now because you can, brother Andrew.
Mourn the families you embraced and those who
Adopted you: Mourn and rejoice:
So many are alive because of you.
So many have hope because of you.

≈≈≈≈≈≈≈


Elaine

I want to lay my head in the warmth of your lap
Then watch iridescent stars fall behind your hair
Trace your brow’s shape, the pomme of your cheek
Touch your lips, while tracing light in scintillant eyes.

I feel the emanating warmth of your womb
Hear your voice in the dark, taste its sweet depths;
Then feel your pulse beat through your sex
As you shape the sounds of your words - like angels falling,

One-third, from the sky.
Auburn-haired woman, sapphire-braided skies
Halo you, while stars hang pendant
From your tilted head even Renoir could not capture.

Kiss me with your eyes (and lips),
Sing to me with your honeyed voice.

≈≈≈≈≈≈≈

SEB

I scent you in the breeze of fall as Spring --
Soft fire, feminine song, emerald eyes: You. 
You evanesce sooner than the scent of
Your body. Oh Soñia, how I wish that you would

Place my ring on your finger –and you do.
But don’t you know what that means?
Or best, you do. That’s what leans me
To you, emerald eyes, Soñia

Such womanly hips, such warm thighs. I
Follow your time, your rhythm, your honeyed
Voice, knowing that once I surrender to you -- if
That is what you wish -- I am complete or finished.

Indicate, say, tell me all I need to know.
Time, age, those erase if you say them so.
​
Picture



​David Vela
 is a professor of English at Diablo Valley College, in Pleasant Hill, California, where he is also an advisor to veterans and an instructor and mentor in the Puente Project.
 ​

0 Comments

    Archives

    April 2022
    March 2022
    February 2022
    January 2022
    November 2021
    October 2021
    September 2021
    August 2021
    July 2021
    June 2021
    May 2021
    March 2021
    January 2021
    December 2020
    November 2020
    October 2020
    September 2020
    August 2020
    July 2020
    June 2020
    May 2020
    April 2020
    March 2020
    February 2020
    January 2020
    November 2019
    October 2019
    September 2019
    August 2019
    July 2019
    June 2019
    May 2019
    April 2019
    March 2019
    February 2019
    January 2019
    November 2018
    September 2018
    August 2018
    July 2018
    May 2018
    April 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018
    March 2017
    January 2017
    May 2016
    February 2010

    Categories

    All
    Archive
    Argentina
    Bilingüe
    Book
    Book Excerpt
    Book Review
    Boricua
    California
    Caribbean
    Central American
    Cesar Chavez
    Chicano
    Chicano/a/x
    Chumash
    Chupacabra
    Círculo
    Colombiana
    Colombian American
    Colonialism
    Cuban American
    Culture
    Current Events
    Death
    Debut
    Dia De Los Muertos
    Diaspora
    Dominican American
    Dreams
    East Harlem
    Ecology / Environment
    El Salvador
    Emerging Writer
    English
    Excerpt
    Family
    Farmworker Rights / Agricultural Work / Labor Rights Issues
    Flashback
    Floricanto
    Food
    Identity
    Immigration
    Imperialism
    Indigenous
    Indigenous / American Indian / Native American / First Nations / First People
    Interview
    Language
    Latin America
    Love
    Mature
    Memoir
    Memory
    Mestizaje
    Mexican American
    Mexico
    Nahuatl
    Nicaraguan-diaspora
    Ofrenda
    Patriarchy
    Performance
    Peruvian American
    Poesia
    Poesía
    Poesía
    Poet Laureate
    Poetry
    Prose Poetry
    Puerto Rican Disapora
    Puerto Rico
    Racism
    Review
    Salvadoran
    Social Justice
    Southwest
    Spanish
    Spanish And English
    Surrealism
    Texas
    Translation
    Travel
    War
    Women
    Young-writers

    RSS Feed

HOME INICIO

​ABOUT SOBRE

SUBMIT ENVIAR

​SUPPORT
​APOYAR 

Donate and Make Literature Happen

Somos En Escrito: The Latino Literary Online Magazine
is published by the Somos En Escrito Literary Foundation,
a 501 (c) (3) non-profit, tax-exempt corporation. EIN 81-3162209
©Copyright  2022
  • HOME INICIO
  • ABOUT SOBRE
  • SUBMIT ENVIAR
  • Books
  • TIENDA