Follow along as Ivan Argüelles performs the poem

​                            para mi hermana
I fell asleep in my father’s arms
though dead he’s been more than 20 years
I nestled in his reek of disguised alcohol
shaving lotion old spice tropic fantasy
it’s easy to forget just how hard it was 
to earn his love and companionship
exile that he was with Guadalajara hair
a faint curse was ever on his lips
for the routines of Lutheran synecdoche
and sarcasm dripped constantly 
in the twinkle of his cinematic eyes
still I burrowed in his post meridian clasp
a whole afternoon with his lemon drops
and Mexican newspaper headlines
in and out of oils and acrylics on canvas
street names for unknown saints and
incense burning dense as beeswax in the air
distance was his propriety and music
with Saint John of the Cross at 3 AM
blear-eyed from bar-hopping bouts
and mornings wrapped in tortilla dough
he hustled remote as a pyramid of oil
through days of anathema and dialect
how could I in his embrace ever fall
curtail my living self in his promised death
full hours of plight and anguish smoking
decks of pall mall cigarettes his hand
unwavering holding the subtle brush
to splash color over an unwrapped thought
a cathedral a half-dead donkey colonial
houses muffled in Aztec silver-work
filigree of bluish haze his archaic skies
riddled with recollections of a mountain
and the immense purple mysteries
of a Tenochtitlan buried in Toltec grief
winding sheets and Amarillo sweat dying
the ruffled edges of his floating bed
his caravanserai of forbidden paramours
a theater of nickel soaps and pulque
the brash despair of his uprooted life
going in circles long Sunday afternoons 
when ennui put on a German mask
deriding the colloquy of his solitude
but to nuzzle up to his bristling breath
and die a hundred times just for once
before his own soul took to flight
five thousand miles from his birth
that crazy Mexican of elegance and ire
how far however far from the painted rocks
and shifting gravel of his planned walk-away
only the broken vowels of his idiom
the consonants of cactus and parakeet
cajole my drowsing ear this ancient day
when the whole world tilts drowning
in a gold-fish bowl and darkness overtakes
drowns in a gold-fish bowl
and darkness overtakes 
 
03-19-20
​

Follow along as Rebecca Granado performs "Tres Millas a mi Libertad"

​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.