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​​SOMOS EN ESCRITO
The Latino Literary Online Magazine

POETRY
​POESÍA

paraphrased: Z is for Shoe Missile

4/16/2022

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Excerpts from Z is for Zapatazo 
​by Ruben Rivera
published by Atmosphere Press

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.
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​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.

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

4/13/2022

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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)

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Amah (left), Mrs Mitotes (right)
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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.
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​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.

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My Book of the Dead

1/23/2022

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An Excerpt of Ana Castillo's My Book of the Dead

These Times
 
In these times, you and I share,
amid air you and I breathe,
and opposition we meet,
we take inspiration from day to day thriving.
The sacred conch shell calls us,
drums beat, prayers send up;
aromatic smoke of the pipe is our pledge to the gods.
 
An all-night fire vigil burns
where we may consume the cactus messenger
of the Huichol and of the Pueblo people of New Mexico.
Red seeds of the Tlaxcalteca,
mushrooms of María Sabina,
tes de mi abuela
from herbs grown in coffee cans on a Chicago back porch,
tears of my mother on an assembly line in Lincolnwood, Illinois,
aid us in calling upon memory,
in these times.
 
In other days,
when memory was as unshakeable as the African continent
and long as Quetzalcoátl’s tail in the underworld,
whipping against demons, drawing blood,
potent as Coatlicue’s two-serpent face
and necklace of hearts and hands
(to remind us of our much-required sacrifices
for the sake of the whole).
We did what we could to take memory
like a belt chain around the waist to pull off,
to beat an enemy.
 
But now, in these times of chaos and unprecedented greed,
when disrupted elements are disregarded,
earth lashes back like the trickster Tezcatlipoca,
without forgiveness if we won’t turn around, start again,
say aloud: This was a mistake.
We have done the earth wrong and
we will make our planet a holy place, again.
I can, with my two hands,
palpitating heart; we can, and we will
turn it around, if only we choose.
 
In these times, all is not lost, nothing forever gone,
tho’ you may rightly think them a disgrace.
Surely hope has not abandoned our souls,
even chance may be on our side.
 
There are women and men, after all,
young and not so young anymore,
tired but tenacious,
mothers and fathers, teachers and those who heal and do not
know that they are healers,
and those who are learning
for the sole purpose of returning what they know.
Also, among us are many who flounder and fall;
they will be helped up by we who stumble forward.
All of these and others must remember.
We will not be eradicated, degraded, and made irrelevant,
not for a decade or even a day. Not for six thousand years
have we been here, but millions.
 
Look at me. I am alive and stand before you,
unashamed despite endless provocations
railed against an aging woman.
My breasts, withered from once giving suckle
and, as of late, the hideousness of cancer,
hair gone grey,
and with a womb like a picked fig
left to dry in the sun; so, my worth is gone,
they say.
My value in the workplace, also dwindled,
as, too, the indispensable role of mother.
As grandmother I am not an asset in these times
but am held against all that is new and fresh.
Nevertheless, I stand before you;
dignity is my scepter. I did not make the mess
we accept in this house.
When the party is done,
the last captive hung—fairly or unjustly--
children saved and others lost,
the last of men’s wars declared,
trade deals busted and others hardly begun,
tyrants toppled, presidents deposed,
police restrained or given full reign upon the public,
and we don’t know where to run
on a day the sun rose and fell
and the moon took its seat in the sky,
I will have remained
the woman
who stayed behind to clean up.
 
From My Book of the Dead by Ana Castillo © 2021 by Ana Castillo. Courtesy of High Road Books, an imprint of the University of New Mexico Press.
My Book of the Dead
 
I
 
They say in the Underworld
one wanders through a perennial winter, an Iceland of adversity.
Some end in Hades,
consumed by ¨res that Christians and Pagans both abhor.
<#>
My ancestors too imagined a journey that mirrored Earth.
Nine corridors--
each more dreadful than the one before--
        promised paradise.
You kept your soul but not your skin.
 
II
 
When my time came to return to the womb, I wasn’t ready.
Anti-depressants, sex, a trip, prize, company of friends,
love under moonlight
or generous consumption of wine--
nothing did the trick to ease my mind.
 
When the best, which is to say, the worst
rose from swamp,
elected to lead the nation--
I presumed my death was imminent.
Eyes and ears absorbed
from the media what
shouldn’t have been.
Had I time traveled back to 1933?
Perhaps I’d only woken to a bad dream,
or died and this was, in fact,
Purgatory--
(Did being dead mean you never died?)
 
The new president and appointed cabinet soon grabbed royal seats
happy as proverbial rats in cheese.
An era of calamity would follow.
Holy books and history had it written.
¦e Book of Wisdom, for example,
spoke of the wicked
rollicking down the road,
robbing the in¨rmed and the old.
¦ey mocked the crippled and dark skinned--
anyone presumed weak or vulnerable.
 
Election Night--
I was alone but for the dog, moon obscured by nebulous skies;
sixty-odd years of mettle like buoy armbands kept me afloat.
Nothing lasts forever, I’d thought.
 
Two years passed,
world harnessed by whims of the one per cent.
I managed--
me and the dog,
me and the clouds, contaminated waters, and unbreathable air--
to move, albeit slowly, as if through sludge,
pain in every joint and muscle.
Sad to behold,
equally saddened of heart,
and still we marched.
 
III
 
Sun came up and set.
Up and down, again.
My throbbing head turned ball of iron.
Thoughts fought like feral cats.                       Nothing made sense.
The trek felt endless,
crossing blood rivers infested with scorpions,
lost in caverns,
squeaking bats echoed, µying past, wings hit my waving hands.
 
I climbed jutting flint, bled like a perforated pig,
ploughed through snow-driven sierra, half-frozen—lost gravity,
swirled high,
hit ground hard.
Survived, forged on.
Two mountains clashed like charging bulls.
Few of us made it through.
 
(Ancestors’ predictions told how the Sixth Sun would unfold with
hurricanes, blazes, earthquakes, & the many that catastrophes
would leave in their wake.)
 
IV
 
(Demons yet abound, belching havoc and distress.
Tens of thousands blown by gales of disgrace.)
 
V
 
(I hold steadfast.)
 
VI
 
 ca. 1991
 
The Berlin Wall was coming down. One afternoon beneath
gleaming skies of Bremen, Dieter was dying (exposure to asbestos
in his youth). “My only lament in dying would be losing memory,”
my friend said. “All whom I knew and all whom I loved will be
gone.” Once a Marxist, after cancer—reformed Lutheran. (It was
a guess what Rapture would bring a man with such convictions.)
A boy during third Reich, Dieter chose to safekeep recollec-
tions—from the smells of his mother’s kitchen to the streets of
Berlin that reeked of rotting flesh as a boy. Men had always killed
men, he concluded, raped women, bayoneted their bellies and torn
   out the unborn, stolen children, stomped infants’ heads, commit-
   ted unspeakable acts for the sake of the win, occupy land,
exact revenge,
glory for the sake
of a day in the sun.
 
(Do the dead forget us?
I ask with the lengthening of days each spring.
Do they laugh at our naïveté, long
for what they left behind?
Or do they wisely march ahead, unfazed?)
 
VII
 
Xibalba (Ximoayan & Mictlán
& Niflheim, where Dieter rightly should have gone)
cleansed human transgressions
with hideous punishments.
You drank piss, swallowed excrement, and walked upside down.
Fire was involved at every turn.
Most torturous of all, you did not see God.
Nine hazards,
nine mortal dangers for the immortal,
nine missed menstruations
while in the womb that had created you--
it took four years to get to heaven after death.
 
Xibalba is a place of fears,
starvation, disease, and even death after death.
A mother wails (not Antcleia or la Llorona
but a goddess). “Oh, my poor children,”
Coatlicue laments.
Small skulls dance in the air.
Demon lords plot against the heavens
 
I wake in Xibalba.
Although sun is bright
and soft desert rain feels soothing,
fiends remain in charge.
They take away food, peace of any kind,
pollute lakes, water in which to bathe or drink,
capture infants, annihilate animals in the wild.
(These incubi and succubi come in your sleep,
leave you dry as a fig
fallen on the ground.)
 
VIII
 
There were exceptions to avoid the Nine Hells.
Women who died giving birth to a future warrior
became hummingbirds dancing in sunlight.
Children went directly to the Goddess of Love
who cradled them each night.
Those who drowned or died of disease,
struck by lightning or born for the task,
became rainmakers--
my destiny—written in the stars.
Then, by fluke or fate, I ended underground
before Ehecátl with a bottomless bag of wind
that blew me back to Earth.
 
IX
 
Entering the first heaven,
every twenty-eight days
the moon and I met. When I went
to the second, four hundred sister stars were eaten
by our brother, the sun. Immediately he spit them out,
one by one, until the sky was ¨lled
again.
 
In the third,
sun carried me west.
In the fourth, to rest.
I sat near Venus,
red as a blood orange.
In the fifth, comets soared.
Sixth and seventh heavens were magni¨cent
shades of blue.
Days and nights without end became
variations of black.
Most wondrously,
God dwelled there,
a god of two heads,
female and male,
pulled out arrows
that pierced skin on my trek.
“Rainmakers belong to us,” the dual god spoke,
his-her hand as gentle as his-her voice was harsh.
Realizing I was alive I trembled.
“You have much to do,” he-she directed.
Long before on Earth a Tlaxcaltec healer
of great renown crowned me
granicera,
placed bolts of lightning in my pouch.
I walked the red road.
Then came the venom
and the rise of demons
like jaguars devouring human hearts.
They brought drought,
tornados, earthquakes, and hurricanes--
every kind of loss and pain.
The chaos caused confusion,
ignorance became a blight.
(Instead of left, I’d turned right,
believed it day when it was night.
I voyaged south or maybe north through in¨nity,
wept obsidian tears before the dual god--
“Send me back, please,” I cried.
“My dear ones mourn me.”)
 
X
 
The Plumed Serpent’s conch blew,
a swarm of bees µew out from the shell.
Angels broke giant pots that sounded like thunder.
Gods caused all manner of distraction
so that I might descend without danger.
Hastily, I tread along cliffs, mountain paths,
past goat herds and languishing cows.
A small dog kept up as we followed
the magenta ribbons of dawn.
I rode a mule at one point,
glided like a feather in air at another,
ever drifting toward
my son,
the granddaughter of copper hair,
sound of a pounding drum--
we found you there, my love,
waiting by the shore,
our return.
 
From My Book of the Dead:  New Poems by Ana Castillo © 2021 Ana Castillo. Excerpt courtesy of High Road Books, an imprint of the University of New Mexico Press. Buy a copy from the publisher here.
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​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.

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More alone than my first day of School

11/3/2021

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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.

Two Poems by María (Jesú) Estrada

                                "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
"Jesucristo Santificanos" was originally published in A Language and Power Reader: Representations of Race in a "Post-Racist" Era by Utah State University Press; 1st edition (October 15, 2014).
"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.
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​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. 

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Join a New Grito!

9/13/2021

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Mexican and Central American Independence Day Celebration 

A NEW GRITO FOR CHANGE

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On September 16, 1810, Father Miguel Hidalgo delivered the Grito de Dolores, a declaration of independence from Spanish colonialism; and a call for the abolition of African slavery, for an end to the caste system exploiting Indians, and for social and economic reform. Today, Mexicans and Central Americans are forced out of their home countries by a history of U.S. military intervention and exploitation, including International Monetary Fund and World Bank debt payments, imposed austerity programs, privatization schemes and “free trade” agreements: U.S. corporate domination to create a source of cheap labor. People that migrate to the United States face ICE repression, denial of their right to organize and lack of legal enforcement of workplace protections: forcing them into low-wage jobs.

Join us in a New Grito: a call for worker rights for all such as human rights, independence from poverty, full legalization and fair trade not exploitation!
 
Performances by Diana Gameros, Francisco Herrera, Enrique Ramírez, Elizabeth Esteva and Diego Sardaneta
 
Poetry by Rafael Jesús González and Nancy Esteva 
 
Presentations by David Frias, San Francisco Living Wage Coalition; Sara Terry Manríquez and Elvia Villescas of Las Hormigas; Karen Oliva, Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador; Porfirio Quintano, Hondurans in the Diaspora; Meredith Wilkinson, Network in Solidarity with Guatemala; Diana Bohn, Nicaragua Information Center for Community Action; and David Bacon, Dignity Campaign organizing committee
Wednesday, September 15
6 p.m. – 8 p.m.
​

Register in advance for this virtual event
https://bit.ly/NewGritoforChange
Donations to benefit the San Francisco Living Wage Coalition, Las Hormigas of Ciudad Juarez, Trabajo Cultural Caminante and Bay Area Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador
​

For more information, contact (415) 863-1225 or sflivingwage@riseup.net or visit www.livingwage-sf.org
Celebracíón del Día de Independencia Mexicana y Centroamericana

UN GRITO NUEVO PARA CAMBIO

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El 16 de septiembre de 1810, el Padre Miguel Hidalgo entregó el Grito de Dolores, una declaración de la independencia del colonialismo español; y una llamada para la abolición de la esclavitud africana, para un fin al sistema de la casta que explota a los indios, y para la reforma social y económica. Hoy, mexicanos y centroamericanos están forzados a salir fuera de sus patrias a causa de una larga historia de la intervención militar estadounidense, la explotación del los pagos de deuda del Fondo Monetario Internacional y Banco Mundial, los programa impuestos de la austeridad, los esquemas de la privatización y los acuerdos de "libre cambio": la dominación corporativa de EEUU para crear una fuente de obra barata. Los migrantes a los Estados Unidos, enfrentan la represión de la migra, la negación de su derecho de organizar y la falta de protecciones legales en su lugar de trabajo: forzandolos a aceptar trabajos de bajos-sueldos.

Unámonos en un nuevo Grito: una llamada para los derechos del trabajador tales como los derechos humanos, la independencia de la pobreza y la completa legalización y "fair trade" sin exploitación.
 
Música por by Diana Gameros, Francisco Herrera, Enrique Ramírez, Elizabeth Esteva and Diego Sardaneta
 
Poesía por Rafael Jesús González and Nancy Esteva
 
Presentaciones de David Frías, Coalición de Salario Digno de San Francisco; Sara Terry Manríquez and Elvia Villescas of Las Hormigas; Karen Oliva, Comité en Solidaridad con el Pueblo de El Salvador; Porfirio Quintano, Hondureños en la Diáspora; Meredith Wilkinson, Red en Solidaridad con Guatemala; Diana Bohn, Centro de Información de Nicaragua para la Acción Comunitaria; David Bacon, Comité organizador de la Campaña Dignidad
miércoles, 15 de septiembre
6 p.m. – 8 p.m.
​

Regístrese para este evento, virtual en línea
https://bit.ly/NewGritoforChange
Donaciones para beneficio de la Coalición de Salario Digno de San Francisco, Las Hormigas de Ciudad Juárez, Trabajo Cultural Caminante y Área Bahía Comité en Solidaridad con el Pueblo de El Salvador
 
Para más información, comuníquese al 415-863-1225 o sflivingwage@riseup.net o visite www.livingwage-sf.org
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THE FALL OF KABUL

8/16/2021

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GHAZNI, AFGHANISTAN - NOVEMBER 2010: An Afghan boy rides his bike as a Polish and US soldiers from Task Force White Eagle patrol his village. Photo by Ryanzo W. Perez.

New Poetry by Ivan ​Argüelles

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
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​​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.

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Me llamo Marina; o quizá Malinche; o quizá Malinallitzin

6/23/2021

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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. 
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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. 

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For the poets of Myanmar & all poets killed resisting tyranny

5/31/2021

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Luna para poetas asesinados
​​
                    Creyeron que te enterraban
                    ​y lo que hacían era enterrar una semilla.
                         Ernesto Cardenal, epitafio para la tumba
                         de Adolfo Báez Bone revolucionario nicaragüense
 

          para los poetas de Myanmar,
          y todos los poetas muertos
          ​resistiendo tiranía.

Inmensa, cerca a la Tierra, la luna,
jala a las mareas de los mares
y de la sangre.
En la sombra de la Tierra,
se tiñe escarlata
como laca birmana
por los atardeceres de la Tierra.
¿O será que se ruboriza de furia,
partera, madrina de la vida?
La sangre de sus sumos sacerdotes,
los poetas, corre roja en las calles
 
Pero mátenos
y otros se levantarán.
Palabras cargadas
de verdad, belleza, amor
no mueren; encienden el pensar
y hacen revolución en el corazón.
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Moon for Murdered Poets

                    They thought that they buried you
                    & what they did was bury a seed.
                         Ernesto Cardenal, epitaph for the tomb
                               of Adolfo Báez Bone, Nicaraguan revolutionary


          for the poets of Myanmar,
          & all poets killed
          ​resisting tyranny.
 
Huge, near Earth, the moon
pulls at the tides of the sea
and of the blood.
In the Earth’s shadow,
she is tinged scarlet,
like Burmese lacquer,
by the sunsets of the Earth.
Or is it that she flushes in fury,
midwife, godmother of life?
The blood of her high-priests,
the poets, runs red in the streets.
 
But kill us
and others will rise.
Words freighted
with truth, beauty, love
do not die; they ignite thought
and make revolution in the heart.
 
© Rafael Jesús González 2021
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​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/. 

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Robert René Galván's latest poetry book published!

1/3/2021

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Robert René Galván's Tía Luz Ruiz, center
Undesirable – Race and Remembrance is a collection of poems by Robert René Galván, inspired by a boyhood raised in the heart of Texas, days spent between his folks’ home in San Marcos and family in San Antonio. René has a way not only of shaping the meaning of words but how he wants us to see and feel what he has seen and felt: in this book, his memories become ours.

​​Born in San Antonio, he now lives in New York City, a noted Chicano poet and multi-talented musician. He is the product of a legacy fashioned by Galván’s antepasados who survived the Great Depression, the WWII years, the decades of discrimination and deprivation–a communal memory that he treasures and preserves in this book.
Two recent poems by René have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and one other for the Best of the Net competitions for 2020. 
Born in San Antonio, he now lives in New York City, a noted Chicano poet and multi-talented musician. He is the product of a legacy fashioned by Galván’s 
antepasados who survived the Great Depression, the WWII years, the decades of discrimination and deprivation–a communal memory that he treasures and preserves in this book.

​
​Galván tells of his elders riding on aging trucks to harvest a few dollars from the fields in the ’30s and ’40s, of his writer father filling his ink pen, its “barrel, incandescent as opal,” of the childhood home bought through a white friend so his family could buy it, even of the relentless reach of racism when recently a white man cursed him for being brown in a NYC supermarket.
​The subtitle, Race and Remembrance, speaks to the dark undertones of the obras in his book; the cover hints at the seemingly fun trips his elders made from Texas to California to harvest the grapes, pick clean the beet fields, and whatever other crop farmers were hiring workers to pick.
​​
The cover photo shows his mother, Eva Mireles Ruiz, third from the left, with some of her siblings and cousins, seated, legs dangling, on the bed of Abuelito Toño's truck, which carried the family to California and back as migrant workers. His Aunt Belia is far left and his Uncle Reyes (of the poem, “Hero”) is on the far right.
​An earlier collection of poems titled, Meteors, was published by Lux Nova Press (1997). He is also featured in Puro ChicanX Writers of the 21st Century (2020). Another book of poems, The Shadow of Time, is forthcoming from Adelaide Books in 2021. Other poems are found in Adelaide Literary Magazine, Azahares Literary Magazine, Gyroscope, Hawaii Review, Hispanic Culture Review, Newtown Review, Panoply, Somos en Escrito Magazine, Stillwater Review, West Texas Literary Review, the Winter 2018 issue of UU World, and Yellow Medicine Review: A Journal of Indigenous Literature, Art and Thought.
Copies are available in print and e-book formats from online booksellers (including Amazon and Barnes & Noble), but we ask that you support your local bookstores. 
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The death they sold

8/7/2020

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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.

El Bronx, Bogotá D.C.
By Laurisa Sastoque

May 28, 2016. 5:20 A.M. 2500 members of the public forces entered the area.
What they found: 130 underage sexual workers, 508 homeless people,
56 slot machines, 1000 “bazuco” doses, 1 kidnapped victim behind a false wall.

 
Two alleys in between a police command,
a military garrison and a church, L-shaped:
to the right, there was a clandestine market of stolen
objects, to the left, taquilleros that trafficked
one dose of bazuco for 2000 pesos--
queues of dried mouths and fidgeting thumbs. They sold
 
20 doses per minute, 8 taquillas sold
460 million pesos’ worth. They would command
the homeless to smuggle sacks of 2000-peso
bills out on their mules. Every day was shaped
by weed rolls and bazuco bags. They trafficked
cocaine residues cooked in red gasoline, stolen
 
bone and brick dust. Lives were stolen:
“The vicio does not spare anyone,” they sold
the promise of a lawless paradise, trafficked
the cheapest drugs. Influence would command
even the wide-eyed rich to trade their steel-shaped
watches for a night in an olla—4000 pesos
 
for a consumption safehouse—a few pesos
for a prostitute. “El bazuco had stolen
the glow in her eyes and her crystal-shaped
shoes when I fell for her. She was sold
to a taquillero three weeks after her first command--
she lost her teeth but never her beauty. They trafficked
 
her body.” Through tunnels, they trafficked
victims underground--sapos who were worth in pesos
less than the bullets they shot. Taquilleros’ commands
for imprisonment in “torture houses” had stolen
their limbs and their poisoned blood. They sold
their remains to be cremated and confined to pill-shaped
 
bazuco powder. Sometimes the devils in L-shaped
Bronx would hide the vice they trafficked--
the souls they lured—the death they sold--
for annual inspections. But with a few pesos,
they bribed their way into the streets they had stolen
to confuse the press and evade the police commands.
 
In 2016 public defense authorities dismantled the area.
They hope to build a Cultural District for the city’s people
by 2023, on top of blood-stained demolished walls.



Glossary:
bazuco,  illegal narcotic substance made from cocaine residue.
taquilleros, operators of points of drug sale within el bronx known as “taquillas.”                                                                                                                
vicio, refers to the addiction caused by bazuco.
sapos, translates literally to “frog,” figuratively to “snitch.”
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Laurisa Sastoque, born in Bogotá, Colombia, is a creative writing student at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, where she lives. Due to the Covid-19 situation, she is living in Colombia. “El Bronx, Bogotá D.C” is based on an area in Bogotá, Colombia known as El Bronx.​​

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