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

​
​​SOMOS EN ESCRITO
The Latino Literary Online Magazine

POETRY
​POESÍA

but we don’t go home until the field is done

4/13/2022

0 Comments

 
Picture
Uncle Cedro and Cousin Johnny (middle two)

Toil and Soil and Privilege
​
by Joe Menchaca

little boy toiling in the beet field watching
white people gather for a track meet
toil and soil and summer sweat
rows extending to the end of dreams
melt youthful vigor into
puddles of warm despair
 
across the road they’re gathering
’neath the cover of umbrellas flowering
like tulips blooming in the manicured turf
they’re sitting on nylon camping chairs
’n sipping cold-sweat bottles of Gatorade
pulled from coolers the colors of fire & ice
 
I’m so hot and thirsty tired and dirty
said the little boy to the relentless sun
but we don’t go home until the field is done
while across the road cheers and laughter
and idle chatter waft on breezes carrying
the scents of sunscreen ’n privilege
PictureMom (right), Aunt Jennie (left)

Picture
Amah (left), Mrs Mitotes (right)
Picture
Aunt Mary circa 1930s
​The photos above show some of the author's family members. The third photo the author mentions in his description below is the one used at the beginning of the feature.

​In his words: The one of my mom and great aunt Jennie was taken at a migrant worker camp called a "Colonia." The next one is of my Great-Grandmother, the full-blood Yaqui from Mexico; my brother and sister and I called her Amah. Third one is my Great-Uncle and cousin in between members of one of the families who worked the fields with them. Those three were taken in Weld County, Colorado in the early 1940s. The fourth one is my aunt in a beet field taken some time in the 1930s. I included that one because it closely aligns with the poem's opening line even though it's not of a "little boy." They didn't take pictures of themselves working in the fields because once the work started, as the poem says, they don't stop until the field was done.
Picture
​Joe Menchaca is an emerging writer of fiction, poetry, and nonfiction with a Master of Arts in Professional Creative Writing from the University of Denver. His poetry can be found in Dissident Voice. Joe’s writing is marked by an unpretentious, gritty, and raw yet lyrical style. Unflinching in his examination of self, literature, and culture, his distilled style reflects a sensitive and perceptive exploration of life. Joe, whose parents were migrant workers that settled in Colorado in the 1920s, was raised on farms in Northern Colorado, and in the summers, he worked hoeing beets and picking crops. According to family oral history, one of Joe’s maternal great-grandmothers was full-blood Yaqui from Mexico, and a paternal great-grandfather was full-blood Cherokee. Joe currently lives in Fort Collins, Colorado with his lovely wife of nearly forty years, and Tiny, their Chihuahua.

0 Comments

In some way responsible

3/7/2022

0 Comments

 
Picture

The Redemption of
Roxy Salgado
by David A. Romero

Listen to David A. Romero read "The Redemption of Roxy Salgado" (text below).
“This seatbelt
Is suffocating
The walls
They’re closing in!”
 
These were the words of one Roxy Salgado
From Rowland Heights, CA
Psychology student at UCLA
Before she unclicked her seatbelt
And opened her car door to the 10 Westbound
Psilocybin was pulsing through her veins
A whole bag of magic mushrooms churning in her stomach
Against the advice of members of her cohort
Three of them in that car
Couldn’t manage to calm her down
Prevent her from tumbling out
Somersaults and side rolls
As her body went limp into the wind
The black pavement under the night’s sky
Illuminated by post lights.
 
It wasn’t Roxy’s obituary
In the following morning’s paper
But that of
Patricia Guzman
Mother of three
Resident of Pico Union, Los Angeles
Hailing from San Miguel, El Salvador
Severe trauma to her neck and spine
Blunt force trauma to her brain
From collision with dashboard
An airbag that never deployed
According to her husband Victor
Her last words were,
“Me duele”
“It hurts”
And fragmented questions
About the safety of their children.
 
Roxy awoke at a friend’s house in Southeast Los Angeles
With a headache
Sprained ankle
Some cuts and bruises
Unanswered texts and voicemails
Clothes embedded with gravel
And stained with blood and vomit.
 
Three months later
Roxy is in a state between uppers and downers
Leaning on a chain-link fence
Across the street from a house in Pico Union, Los Angeles
It is once again nighttime
Roxy looks in through partially open windows
Revealing the Guzman family inside
Victor and his three children
There is laughter
There is screaming
There are long silences and muffled whimpers
Victor often walks around aimlessly
Moves to start something
And abruptly stops
The youngest of the three
Lusita
Has a Dora the Explorer doll
Sometimes she talks to it
Clutches it tightly for hours
Crouched in the same spot.
 
One month later
It is the eve of Lusita’s birthday
Roxy has gathered that from outside surveillance
Roxy’s parents
Have no idea she has functionally dropped out of school
Roxy spends most of her days visiting friends and dealers
Going to parties
Kickbacks
Afternoon hangs
Walking the lampposts and pavements of Los Angeles
But every trip eventually takes her back to the Guzmans
On one walk
Roxy found a discarded piñata on a curb
An unlicensed paper mâché and chicken wire
Dora the Explorer
That day Roxy picked it up
Took it with her on the bus and dragged it home
Fashioned it into a costume.
 
Roxy stands now
In the Guzman’s kitchen with it on
After having broken in
Her mind is swimming
With guilt and hope
The pain of something that happened to her long ago
The little girl Lusita
Walks into the room
Sees Roxy
As a shadowed paper mâché monster
And screams
Roxy lifts her costumed hands
To try and comfort Lusita
She wants to hold her for hours
Tell her everything will be ok
Lusita runs away
Continues screaming
Roxy hears rustling in other rooms
Victor shouts,
“¿Qué es eso?”
Roxy panics
Tears the paper mâché head off
Sprints through the kitchen door
Through an alley
A block over
Roxy can still hear Lusita’s terrified wailing
Roxy is panting and sweating
She leans on a fence still partially covered
In the collapsing costume
She weeps
As the neighborhood dogs
Awaken the neighborhood
One snaps behind her
Teeth colliding with the fence
Roxy runs
Eventually finding her way home.
 
Roxy never returns to the Guzmans’
She goes back to attending classes
Asks for extra credit
Graduates
And in time
Finds a job
On her best days
She forgets what happened
On her worst
She drinks
Pops pills
Starts doing something
And abruptly stops
Or sits for hours
In the same spot.
 
The Guzmans struggle with the loss of Patricia
For many years longer
Lusita occasionally awakens with nightmares
Of a paper mâché monster in the house
But in time
The nightmares abate.
 
Victor
Keeps a copy of the paper
On his antique wooden nightstand
With the article about what happened the night Patricia died
And within it
It outlines how Victor
Swerved into the shoulder of the freeway
To avoid a head-on collision
With a truck heading the wrong direction
There is a statement
Issued by the trucking company
Giving their most sincere condolences
Promising the immediate termination of the driver
And in the cold calculations of the value of Patricia’s life
The announcement of a settlement.
 
Nowhere in the article
Is given mention to a Roxy Salgado
Of Rowland Heights, CA
Or any other person
Who may
Or may not have been
In some way
Responsible
For the accident on the 10 Eastbound that night.
Picture
David A. Romero is a Mexican-American spoken word artist from Diamond Bar, CA. Romero has performed at over 75 colleges and universities in over 30 states.
www.davidaromero.com

0 Comments

"few will awake to find that the world kept turning and changed"

2/10/2022

0 Comments

 
Picture

 Excerpts from
The Shadow of Time
​by Robert René Galván

The Shadow of Time
​

New Year’s 2018 – Bear Mountain
 
The International System of Units has defined a second as 9, 192, 631, 770 cycles of radiation corresponding to the transition between two energy levels of the caesium-133 atom.
 
 
The star glares through the glass;
A frozen lake between two mountains;
The world turns on its spine as it has for billions of years.
 
What’s a year?
 
An accretion of eddies within a vast storm,
An endless trek, but more than the distance
Between two points, a resonance we feel compelled to track,
First with arrays of stone, then with falling grains of sand
And complex contraptions of wheels within wheels,
The heartbeat of liquid crystal, the adumbrations of an atom.
 
I listen to what the geese tell me as they form a V in retreat,
The toad as he descends to his muddy rest,
The perennials as they retract beneath the frost,
The empty symmetry of a hornet’s nest,
And the choir of whales fleeing in the deep.
 
They all return like the tides, so tethered to the sun and moon,
While we chop at time with a pendulous blade,
Doomed to live in its shadow.



Awakening
 
And then, the machine stopped;
the sky began to clear
when the great gears
groaned to a halt;
the ground ceased
its shivering,
stars appeared
and beasts emerged
in our absence,
wings cast shadows
over empty streets.
 
In the gnawing silence,
a distant siren
reminds us of a gruesome tally;
we peer from our doorways
for a ray of hope,
long to walk the paths
we barely noticed.
 
In the ebb and flow
of life and death,
we inhabit the low tides,
a scant respite
from irresistible waves.
 
After a time,
most will return to normal,
become mired
in old assumptions
and petty desires,
to the ways that failed us,
 
But a few will awake
to find that the world
kept turning
and changed:
 
They will walk into the sun
And shed their masks.



Hommage à Neruda
 
What does the horseshoe crab
Search for in the murk
With its single hoof,
 
Or the she-turtle
In her lumbering butterfly
Up the shore?
 
Does the quivering hummingbird
Find solace as it probes
The dreaming delphinium,
 
Or the velvet worm
As it reaches with its toxic jets?
 
Are the choral cicadas
Worshiping the sun
After emerging from seventeen
Years of darkness?
 
What of the myriad species
That have come and gone,
The gargantuan sloth,
The pterosaur that glided
Over a vast ocean
From the Andes to the coast
Of Spain,
Saw the seas rise and fall
Back upon themselves,
 
Just as I slumber and wake
For these numbered days.



L’heure Bleue – The Time of Evening
 
The sun has set, but night has not yet fallen. It’s the suspended hour…
The hour when one finally finds oneself in renewed harmony with the world and the light…The night has not yet found its star.    
-Jacques Guerlain
 
As the world folds into shadow,
A grey tapestry descends:
 
The coyote’s lament from the wild place
Across the creek and the fading chorale
Of the late train awaken crepuscular birds
Who inhabit the rift like rare gods.
 
Abuelo sits in the cleft of a mesquite,
His rolled tobacco flickering
With the fireflies as a dim lantern
Receives the adoration of moths;
 
A cat’s eyes glow green
In the gloaming light
And a cloud of mosquitos
Devoured by a flurry of bats.
 
The outhouse door moans open
And the boy treads quietly
On the moonlit stepping stones,
Through the corn and calabacitas,
Under the windmill as it measures
The October wind;
 
Pupils widen like black holes,
Ingest the night spirits,
And he cannot yet imagine
A world beyond these stars,
Or that he will someday
Live in a place where it’s never dark.


 
Sarabande
 
                              for Zuzana Růžičková
 
 
She clutched the leaves
in her hand
as she waited
to be loaded
onto the waiting truck.
 
Somehow, an angry wind
lifted the notes
and they sailed
down the street
like runaway kites,
 
But the music rode
along in her heart,
persisted through
every kind of horror,
from Auschwitz
to Bergen-Belsen,
antithesis of the camp
accordion and broken
strings’ blithe
accompaniment
to endless roll calls
in the bitter cold,
starvation,
dehydration,
executions
and the merriment
of the guards.
 
Those pages looped
in her head
even as she wrestled
a stray beet from the cold ground,
digging with her fingernails
to feed her dying mother.
 
When she returned
to Prague,
her hands were ruined,
and new monsters
would soon appear
in the streets,
but the Sarabande sang
in her insistent fingers
until it circled the soiled world
like a golden thread.
 
 
 
 
* Harpsichordist, Zuzana Růžičková, is considered one of the great musicians of the 20th century.  She survived Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen.
 
The work in question is J.S. Bach’s E minor Sarabande from the fifth book of English Suites. Růžičková had written it out by hand at the age of 13 to take with her during her internment.
Click here to purchase a copy of The Shadow of Time from Adelaide Books.

Picture
Robert René Galván, born in San Antonio, resides in New York City where he works as a professional musician and poet. His previous collections of poetry are entitled, Meteors and Undesirable: Race and Remembrance.  Galván’s poetry was recently featured in Adelaide Literary Magazine, Azahares Literary Magazine, Burningword Literary Journal, Gyroscope, Hawaii Review, Hispanic Culture Review, Newtown Review, Panoply, Sequestrum, Somos en Escrito, Stillwater Review, West Texas Literary Review, and UU World. He is a Shortlist Winner Nominee in the 2018 Adelaide Literary Award for Best Poem. His work has been featured in several literary journals across the country and abroad and has received two nominations for the 2020 Pushcart Prize and one for Best of the Web. René’s poems also appear in varied anthologies, including Undeniable: Writers Respond to Climate Change and in Puro ChicanX Writes of the 21st Century.

0 Comments

We forget what it took to get here

1/2/2022

0 Comments

 
​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.

“On The Car Ride Home”
by Diana Aldrete

For my sister Griselda
 
Time is all but an illusion
stuck in theory
relative to Einstein sitting on a train.
 
Our point of departure,
qualified by loss,
always by those we left behind.
The echoes of goodbyes in the rearview mirror
and the reassurances that no matter space or time
love and remembrance would persist.
 
They ripped us from our beds while it was still dark out,
and dumped us into warmed-up car seats,
the moss of furry blankets ready to cradle us back into slumber.
Papi would say it was to beat the morning traffic,
but Mami made sure to bring our focus back,
“sleep,” she would say. 
But as if by the speed of light
we would wake up past state borders:
Wisconsin, Illinois, Missouri, Oklahoma, Texas,
and then into the open arms of Mexico:
Tamaulipas, Nuevo León, Coahuila, Zacatecas, Jalisco.
 
For many months during the year, and for several years,
we shared stories, family anecdotes,
antidotes to scenarios – lessons to learn from the past
inside that car.
We would look out the window,
finding our gaze upon others,
cocooned in their world-on-wheels,
like a rushing herd of buffalos onto the same greener pastures.
Time passed before us like shadows on a screen,
only able to catch on still motions of the mountains,
the canyon drops,
the desert plains, and the flat lands.
The horizon – our point of destination,
but we always arrived at night,
greeted by the smell of manicured grass,
or the occasional wafts of wet earth.
 
At arrival, we fell concave to our loved one’s embrace.
Kitchen tables became radio stations
flash reports of familial current events
announced over cinnamon-spiced coffee,
burnt tortillas, and mangoes.
 
As children, time blossoms slowly
and memory seems vaguely dispersed.
As the only accomplices to each other in the car,
we now draw maps of stories,
connecting coordinates back to an origin
because memory fails us and we forget what it took to get here,
from the dizzying spells of the altitude sickness
to the hugging of curves down valleys of nostalgia.
 
Now with many roads already traveled,
we fall witness to our displacement,
we negotiate mother tongues in static spaces
not sure if home was there or here,
or if time is dilated.
But a search for home, nonetheless,
an oasis in a desert of despair.
Picture
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.

0 Comments

Cada día es el día de los muertos

11/1/2021

1 Comment

 
Picture
Image by Aurora Uribe

DÍA DE LOS MUERTOS –
​11/4 (JOE & MAX)

​
​by ​Ivan Argüelles

                          i
Brooklyn a park bench a quart bottle of
malt liquor and a brother
how did that happen late spring early death
drone of skies ready to annihilate themselves
an ear wrenched from its rock formation
a buzz of intonations from the Mahatmas
stoned and iridescent in their vanishing
perched like quetzal birds on the telephone wire
high above planet Nothing all comes back
to this moment realization of these deaths
the masks of infancy withering yet beautiful
and Hey ! did you hear the eloquence emanating
from the jazz trumpet of Miles Davis ?
basements in accolades of marijuana smoke
decadence and livelihood waiting for births
for nomenclatures to disclose their irate vowels
in a backyard next door to Betty Carter
mind soaked in tequila playing boyhood one
Last Time and it all falls down the sudden repetition
of a life experience the onset of seizures
the rest of breath reduced to a red parenthesis
inside which the conflagration of ideas and love
recycled eerie representations of store windows
masked and hooded figures demons alluring
and baleful and after that what is there to know
a trip to the outback a dozen hospitalizations
mysterious tumors ventilators bad x-rays
memories of Mayo Clinic cold spells
long periods before and after that no one remembers
but for the poignant high notes the small echo
in its shell and the massive but absent seas
 
                            ii
the little red clarinet case pushed under the bed
sheets wrung out turning yellow from ichor of the gods
transpiration and head-wounds tilted off the moving
wagon on to the sidewalks of inferno and whatever
could that mean the isolation wards and always
the stranger at the door bare-knuckled with a bag
to capture whatever malignant spirits trying to escape
the maps were drawn tight around the peninsula and
causeways and trampolines for the kids to jump
up and down inside the coma where an excised cosmos
auto-destructs with all its plastic passengers
most of whom have traveled to the Yucatan and
harbored nights in Teotihuacan with vessels of ether
the countdown hasn’t even started before the finish
is a fait accompli the forlorn hills of dialect and
twilight the way they reappear in dreams half-beings
bereft of intellect and side-swiped by planetary diesels
plunging like headless horsemen down the Pan-Am Highway
motels and endless waiting rooms dismantled telephones
ambulances and more ambulances the wrong address
and finality of sliding curtains hanging like angels
left to dry from the wars and the doctors of hypnosis
and mercury just staring into the abyss devoid
of language the cuneiform of their brains working
overtime to excuse themselves from all culpability
and soon it’s another Halloween trick or treating
on the doorsteps of a missing basement and phantom
music ascends The Monster Mash with calaveras de
azúcar and the jingles and marionettes of memory
dancing sing-song in the cavities
I got the shakes I’m going fast
 
                           iii
cada día es el día de los muertos
 
11-01-21
Picture
​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.

1 Comment

Set eyes and tongues aflame

9/25/2021

0 Comments

 
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.  

"The Alchemy of Fingertips"
by David Estringel

Long has it been since I’ve heard the shuffle of old slippers on the linoleum floor. The clanging of pans. Squeaks from the rolling pin. The thump…thump…thump of black stone on black stone—the molcajete—mashing cumino seeds and cloves of garlic—with snaps and pops—into glorious salves that staved off hungers, deep and brash. I bless that heavenly transmutation—the thump…thump…thump that spun vulgar sundries into liquid gold. That elixir of lives, swirled with warm love and splashes of water from the tap, poured into pots—cauldrons of arroz con pollo, picadillo, carne guisada, and that pollo con calabaza I could never bring myself to eat—that set eyes and tongues aflame. But, the kitchen is quiet, now, with only the smell of black bananas in the fruit bowl, abandoned dishes on countertops, and—maybe—a sweaty piece of cheese that fell behind the stove. The molcajete is dry as a bone, grieving, quietly, in a corner next to the sink—no tears left to shed (slipped away like fistfuls of quicksilver)—with no philosopher’s stone to bring back the thump…thump…thump of this heart or home nor the alchemy of her fingertips. 
Picture
David Estringel is a Mexican-American writer/poet who was born in Alice, TX and grew up in Brownsville, TX for half of his life. He currently lives in Temple, TX with his five dogs and is finishing his MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Texas - Rio Grande Valley. David started writing three years ago at age 49 and has had his work appear in literary publications, such as The Opiate, Azahares, Cephalopress, North Meridian Review, Poetry Ni, DREICH, Horror Sleaze Trash, and The Blue Nib. His short story, "When Blood Wants Blood," recently appeared in Puro ChicanX Writers of the 21st Century (published by Cutthroat: A Journal of the Arts and The Black Earth Institute). His first collection of poetry and short fiction Indelible Fingerprints (Alien Buddha Press) was published April 2019, followed by three poetry chapbooks, Punctures (Really Serious Literature - 2019), PeripherieS (The Bitchin’ Kitsch - 2020), and Eating Pears on the Rooftop (Finishing Line Press - July 2022). His new book of micro poetry little punctures, a collaboration with UK illustrator and artist, Luca Bowles, will be released in 2022 by Really Serious Literature.

0 Comments

16 de septiembre

9/15/2021

0 Comments

 
Picture

Breve historia de un grito /
​Brief History of a Cry
​

​by Rafael Jesús González

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)
Picture
Brief History of a Cry
  
Three hundred years after
the conquest, the cry of Dolores
was raised, the cry of a hurt people
for independence from the empire.
Twenty & some years
after being independent
Mexico lost more than half
of its land to the younger
empire of the north.
And expelling another invasion
and suffering other tyrannies
the painful cry was made
for revolution. That was a hundred
and more years ago. What can a history
say of the hunger, the thirst,
the pain, the sorrow, the suffering
of which it is made?
Injustice sends very long roots.
Throwing off a yoke is not to be
free; throwing off a yoke is not
the same as attaining justice.
The struggle goes on. So, onward
Mexicans, Chican@s, onward world!
The struggle goes on until justice.
Until justice, the struggle goes on!
 
 © Rafael Jesús González 2021
 (Somos en escrito, septiembre 2021; author’s copyrights)
Picture
Picture
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/. 

0 Comments

De Cierta Arena

8/2/2021

1 Comment

 
Picture

Excerpts from De Cierta Arena

by Maricela Duarte-Stern 
Jane y John Doe*
El sol brilla para todos
y mucho más
cuando en el camino
se van dejando sucesivamente
pétalos
          anhelos
                    uno mismo
 
Dicen que el desierto palpita
por eso los cactus danzan al ritmo
inquebrantable del viento
 
La noche es corta
cuando se va en busca de un sueño
el día es eterno
para quienes ya no pueden abrir los ojos
 
No hay tumba para ellos
allí quedan
mirando al cielo
 
o mejor aún
          bocabajo
en una charla inaudible con la arena
 
* Nombres dados en Estados Unidos a
cadáveres de identidad desconocida.


​
Braceros
Hay instantes
          incluso armoniosos atardeceres
en que las aves buscan a la deriva
          la urna de sus sueños
 
Sin embargo
ese golpe a la memoria
          esa imagen
no es suficiente
para liberarte del pálido hastío de la ausencia
 
Volteas tratando de alcanzar el sur
te aferras a creer
y hasta repasas metódicamente
las calles lluviosas
          y los familiares rincones
que dejaste inconclusos

Tus manos
ahora entrelazadas a la tierra
saben que estas no son tus raíces
y colocan obedientes la cebolla en la cesta
          deseando que sea la última
 
Continúas afanoso
te limpias el sudor justificando
tu mirada inalcanzable
 
Pero
¿qué hay en realidad en tus ojos?



Cuando el poeta escribe
se empeña en develar
lo que hay detrás del pesado telón
que lo sustenta
 
Quiere alumbrar con una vela
el más oscuro de los abismos
 
Se aleja como un ermitaño
más allá del canto de las sirenas
          de los sueños olvidados
 
El poeta busca
y en su travesía
sólo logra recolectar
las minúsculas huellas de la fiera
que aún ruge a lo lejos
 


Mientras escribo
nada puede hacer la tinta
al impregnarse en la hoja
las aguas del tiempo no se detienen
los pasos de la muerte hacen ruido
no permiten escuchar el vertiginoso
          transcurrir de la vida
 
Escribo otro verso
sé que al otro lado del mundo
y dentro de mí
          alguien muere

​

Picture
Maricela Duarte-Stern (Chihuahua, Chih. México 1976) Resides in Las Cruces, New Mexico since 2002. Compiler of: Rehilete, Antología Literaria para Niños. ICHICULT/FONCA 1999. In 2014 published El Gato en la Azotea, by Ediciones Poetazos. Co-author:  Voces de la hispanidad en Estados Unidos:  una antología literaria.  2018. Her most recent book of poetry: De cierta arena Ediciones La Mirada, 2019. 


1 Comment

just mop it up y ya se esconde

6/27/2021

1 Comment

 
Picture

Four poems of
remembrance and loss
​by Lupita Velasco

A note from the author:
These poems were written after my father, Antonio, took his own life—losing his battle with depression and alcoholism. 
No Me Quieren Escuchar
​

I run around with my insides in my hands 
taking them to you, to him, to them.
No one knows what to do,
so you all watch
as I stuff them back in
and conceal them with a cloth.
All is well
even though the blood drips out.
You can ignore it,
just mop it up y ya se esconde.
Todo está bien,
no mal,
just bien.
Hay que seguir aguantando
the pain.
Porque él se fue
sin tí, sin mí
corriendo del dolor de aquí.
​They Move On

I want him remembered,
not forgotten.
But, I’m not allowed to grieve.
Obscurity, sadness, pain
is what everyone sees.
Uncomfortable, intolerable,
 so they don’t speak.
As if erasing him erases the pain.
Now that he is gone the pain is gone.
Life goes on.
All is well.
Package it up with a neat little bow,
and away it goes.
Away from you.
He lives in me.
It’s hard for you to understand.
So, we pretend that you don’t see,
the sadness living in me.
See, you walked away from him
long before he walked away from me. 
Lo Que Dejo

Will I ever feel safe again?
Did I ever feel safe before?
No yo creo que no,
el alcohol siempre tuvo el control.
Querían descansar
de él, y no saber más.
 
Pero ya se fue, ya no está,
y en el vacío no podrán descansar.
O alomejor sí, pero yo no.
Yo siempre lo espere ver mejor.
Que algún día ya no iba tomar
y ya nomás sería buen papá.   
 
El, todos, yo, nomás ocupábamos amor,
pero nos dejamos llevar por el dolor.
Se nos olvidó, que para sanar el dolor
nomás ocupamos demostrar más amor.
Es fácil tenerles compasión a las personas buenas,
pero la compasión también es para las personas enfermas. 
Never Coming Back

A little girl looks to her dad for strength,
the rock that keeps things in their place.
I never knew how safe I felt
until I went one day without
the strongest man I ever knew
the funniest one too.
But he is gone, and this I know:
I have never felt this much alone.
Picture
Lupita Velasco was born in Calvillo, Aguascalientes, Mexico; but grew up as an undocumented immigrant in Oklahoma. As a sheltered immigrant, Lupita found comfort, adventure, and refuge in literature from a very young age. Reading is Lupita’s favorite escape and writing her favorite form of expression. Lupita graduated from the University of Oklahoma in 2011 with a bachelor’s in International Studies and a minor in Criminology. Lupita currently lives in Bethany, Oklahoma with her neurodivergent husband, two daughters, and four chickens.

1 Comment

Me llamo Marina; o quizá Malinche; o quizá Malinallitzin

6/23/2021

0 Comments

 
Picture
Malinallitzin and Hernán Cortés in the city of Xaltelolco, in a drawing from the late 16th-century codex History of Tlaxcala

A Letter From Malinallitzin 
​by José E. Valdivia Heredia

A quien lea mis penas:
 
Me llamo Marina; o quizá Malinche; o quizá Malinallitzin; o quizá la madre de Martín, a veces temaktekauani, la puta traidora que me llama mi gente… En estas noches eternas, en la penumbra de mis penas, no recuerdo mi nombre, no recuerdo quién soy, ni creo tanto que me importe. Aborrezco cada día que pasa y no tenga a mi lado a Martín, piltsintli, amado hijo; aborrezco el día que Hernando se lo llevó a ese infierno lejano que es España; aborrezco el día que mi lengua pronunció el primer sílabo de esta lengua diabólica que es el castellano, kaxtitl. Me siento enferma. El mundo alrededor de mí se derrumba. Mikistli: La muerte subsiste en estas tierras abandonadas por los teteo, los dioses. La plaga se roba mi tranquilidad, se roba mis recuerdos y deseo grabarlo todo antes que los teteo me despojen de este cruel mundo.
 
Algún día yo era de Paynalá; algún día yo era la hija de un cacique, venía de una madre poderosa, de una madre que tuvo que sacrificarme para salvar a mi gente de los mayas invasores, tlapoloani. La perdono porque sé que no fue fácil y sé que mi destino me lo obligó, que yo tuve que llegar a las manos de los españoles aunque mi gente me lo despreciara. Fui esclava de los Tabascos, quienes me regalaron a los sucios españoles, gente que atraía y repugnaba a la vez. Algunos decían que eran dioses, pero yo lo sabía diferente. La gente contaba de las bestias, tekuani, que montaban, que eran parte hombre y parte animal, que eran profetas venidos a rescatarnos. Otros decían que eran tsitsimimej, demonios blancos, que venían a matar con sus armas mágicas. Mikilistli: yo reconocí su humanidad, su mortalidad, su repugnante egoísmo.
 
Naturalmente, al saber los idiomas y las costumbres de estas diversas regiones, me encontré obligada a ser nenepili, la lengua, y auiani, la santa puta, de Cortés. Me regalaron de un hombre a otro como si yo no tuviera el derecho al amor. Y amor sí encontré en el hijo que me dió y después robó Cortés. En los días que pensé no más poder, mi hijo Martín, piltsin, me animaba a seguir luchando, y todo lo di por él. Ahora me encuentro en estas tierras vastas, abandonada y enferma de la plaga con la que nos castigaron los dioses. Alguna gente me mira y me adora; para ellos soy diosa aunque me sienta yo menos que un pobre insecto. Otros me miran y me desprecian; no saben que más me desprecio yo por haber pronunciado las palabras que serían mi fin; no saben que más me desprecio yo por haber sido vendida como animal entre hombre y hombre; no saben que más me desprecio yo por haber perdido lo que más me importaba en la vida, mi dulce Martín.
 
Si alguien lee estas penas mías, recuérdenme. Recuerden lo que sacrifiqué y justifiquen mi vida, que en estos últimos días no puedo justificar ni estas miserables palabras, ni mi miserable respiración.
 
Firmada,
 
Tonameyalotl, la sombra de una pobre mujer. 
Picture
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. 

0 Comments
<<Previous

    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