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

​

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. 

Pilgrim
​
See, some were born to summer homes
And palatial groves
Where pain was only to ever unfold
From the pages of Secret Gardens
Where the Red Fern Grows
But not I
See, I come from the stock
Of starry-eyed astronauts
Who greet the night sky
With big dreams and wide eyes
Always Running
Down the Devil’s Highway
Through Occupied America
On the way back to
The House on Mango Street
And all those other books
You didn’t want us to read
Raised on handball
Off the back wall
Of a panaderia
Born
East the river
Post Mendez vs Westminster
One generation removed
From the redlines
And diplomas signed
That those dreams
In that skin
Need not apply
See, I come from struggle
And if my story offends you
That is only ‘cause you made the mistake of seeking your
reflection
In my self-portrait
See, this
Well this may not be about you
Because while some were born
To the common core
Whose reflected faces
Graced the pages
Of doctrines to discover
And ages to be explored
Where old world hardships
Crashed against new shores
New England
New Hampshire
New Jersey
New York
For others pushed off
Turtle island
Aztlan
Do not call this brown skin immigrant
Child of the sun
Son of the conquest
Mexicano blood
Running through the veins
Of the eastside of Los Angeles
Do not tell him
In what native tongue
His song would best be sung
Do not tell me
Who I am
‘Cause I was raised just like you
Miseducated in some of those
Very same schools
Off lessons and legends
Of honest injuns and Christian pilgrims
And a nation of immigrants
All united in freedom
That is until they pulled aside
My white friend
Pointed directly at me
And said “Scott
I judge you by the company you keep
And you spend your time with this”
And that’s the same old story since 1846
The adventures of Uncle Sam
The stick-up man
Hey wetback
Show me your papers
Now give me your labor
The Melting Pot
Was never meant for the hands
That clean it
The American dream
Has always come at the expense
Of those who tucked it in
And you don’t know that
‘Cause you don’t teach it
Could write you a book
But you won’t read it
So you know what
This is about you
And 1492
And the treaty of Guadalupe
California missions
And Arizona schools
And these racists
That try to erase us
As we raise their kids
In cities that bear our names
But you’re going to learn
Something today
‘Cause from Ferdinand
To minuteman
From Arpaio
To Alamo
From Popol Vuh
To Yo Soy Joaquin
To the Indian that still lives in me
From Mexico 68
To the missing 43
They tried to bury us
They didn’t know we were seeds
From Cananea mine
To Delano strike
From the Plan De Ayala
Emiliano Zapata
Joaquin Murrieta
Las Adelitas
Brown Berets
And Zapatistas
From Richard Nixon
To the Third Napoleon
From Peckinpah
To Houston
From Lone Star Republic
To Christopher Columbus
All the way down
To Donald fucking Trump
We didn’t cross the borders
The borders crossed us
Who you calling immigrant
Pilgrim?

Carved Over
​
Draw a map
Line the sand
Carve the desert
Act on land
Amend it
Eminent domain
Indefinite detention
Private prisons
Public referendum
Gentrification
Naturalization
Americanization
Forced sterilization
Make America Great Again
Mexico will pay
The hunt for Murrieta
The hunt for Pancho Villa
John Pershing’s slaughter of the innocents
A severed head
Touring California museums
Becomes Zorro
Becomes the Wild Bunch
Becomes whitewash
This American Life
Experience
Its imagination
If you can dream it
You can see it
And if you can see it
You can build it
And if you build it
You can take it
And if they resist
Manifest a cruelty
So complete
That for generations
They will do it to themselves
Build a city
Draw its borders
Patrol its districts
Add silence to injury
Insult without memory
Protect these borders
From language and culture
Taco trucks
And Dora the Explorer
The country is changing
And you know it
It’s simple mathematics
And you know it
You have kept us weak
By keeping us confused
Your grandchildren
Will speak Spanglish
In the neighborhood
You grew up in
Greeting their friends
On the corner
Of your childhood
And cherished memories
Under the lamplight
And faded midst
This historic site
Of your first kiss
Where you learned
To sink
Before you learned to swim
Where you
And she
Carved your names to trees
And promised each other
Forever
But
Memories fade
Neighborhoods change
And your names will be carved over
And there is nothing
You can do about it
And you know this too
So when Donald Trump
Says drug dealers and rapists
And Kelly Osbourne jumps in
To correct him
No Donald
Those people are just here to clean our shit
When you
Sit so comfortably
Speak so freely
About a group of people
Who are somehow everywhere
Yet at the same time
No one
Hold your tongue
We are far closer than you know

​Review by Scott Duncan-Fernandez
​
​
We Chicanos still need words to express our occupied experience even after 173 years. Mowing Leaves of Grass by Matt Sedillo has those words, slings out the curses to whomever has it coming. That necessary verbal retaliation of humanity that brown bodies and minds need. Social justice and history books are great, but we live in and by poetry.
​
I’m a Xicano, these words are for me, speak for me. I am impressed how much work Chicano art accomplishes: our art is functional. Sedillo’s Mowing Leaves of Grass lives up to this. You may find yourself in the work, in this too personal political experience of being Xicano in America, or you may come to understand the experience better as fellow human beings.

I’ve lived the poem, “A Chicano in Liverpool,” when the poet is asked do you belong here, though as a Chicano in Brighton, UK. My family and I have been, “Carved Over,” contended with fantasies about us and told we don’t belong in our homeland.
I’m sure many folks have commented on the title, Mowing Leaves of Grass, a reference to Mr. Body Electric. I liked studying him in high school and college, but never forgot what soured the milk: Whitman’s excitable thoughts that the Mexican-American War would be the fulfillment of Anglo superiority. In this education system we Chicanos are often forced to study and agree wholeheartedly with statements, literary works, and famous authors that advocate for our troglodyte inherency to servitude or how we are better off dead.

For all his exalting of the body electric, WW ain’t talking about my brown body or African bodies. White bodies need only apply for the full body kung fu glow in his world. Of course, they didn’t teach his thoughts on the matter in high school or college. The American school system likes to sanitize and exculpate northern Europeans, call slaves workers, say the land was empty and just waiting for development, that Mexicans were too lazy here in the underpopulated and underfunded frontier to get anything done. What more proof of this white supremacy than the current Texas Legislature’s further attempt to whitewash history and combat the truth of black and brown humanity and that the system built on us is oppressive and wrong.

I’m quite okay with Whitman getting mowed along with much of the American literary canon, the Anglocentric selection of works that academia advertises and empowers by its own authority.

Mowing Leaves of Grass is a cry against the American experience and for the Indigenous American, one often we Chicanos must steal back as our detractors use the earlier marks of Spanish conquest against us, or make exploitative tourist fantasies of us, as mentioned in “Carved Over.” This poem is a mental overthrow of the USA’s colonial idea of us as foreigners which is accomplished as well in the poem, “Pilgrim.” This poem “Pilgrim” was read at the first Aztlán Report, a state of the raza yearly event started this year in 2021. The Aztlán Report was a gathering of Chicano organizations to inform about the events and activities of the year pertinent the Mexican American experience. I attended as a member of MeXicanos 2070, a non-profit Chicano organization dedicated to protecting and enhancing our culture. A perfect setting for this counter colonial poem.

These poems come from a year ago, el tiempo de naranja, the time of Trump. Sedillo cusses Trump, cusses his followers. Points out that we Xicanos are the future.  Mowing Leaves of Grass, the book and the titular poem is mowing the canon, decolonizing the mind of education, American education. At times, it hits the same note, the note of resistance, but we are offered some poems like “La Reina,” where it’s a celebration of women who have persevered and transmitted culture, like my birth city of LA itself. 

We need more than witnessing to provide trauma porn for salivating masters, or equally legless rage to amuse them.  We don’t have anger issues, we got reasons to be angry. We need that emotion and reason, the chants and incantation in this collection that will heal and forge us. We need to be out of control and have un-colonial thoughts.

We deserve our anger; we need to express it. I needed these words when cops approached me as a teenager, guns on me, asked, are you a wetback? and slammed me against my car. I just knew “Fuck Tha Police” by NWA back then.  Now I have the poem, “Custers.” Mowing Leaves of Grass has many stanzas expressing the “ya bastas,” “nada mas,” “best back ups” that Chicanos need.

These poems are angry. I am angry. As I write this, Mario Gonzales is dead, murdered by cops, called on by neighbors for being tall and brown in a public park. He had long hair, the caller said; he looked “Hispanic” or “Indian.” The words describe Mario, me, and the poet. These poems can’t not be personal.

I want everyone to read this. It’s poetry for now, but not limited to it. Mow the canon, celebrate the Xicano electric or find the new words we are on the cusp of speaking thanks to fearless poetry like Sedillo’s.

By Bianca Paz

In my backyard is a fence,
It divides mothers from children,
It divides the collective art form of society,
It divides Mexico from US,
It divides.

“They take away our jobs,” they say
But when they are asked to clean the school hallways,
“It is someone else’s job for lower pay.”

Land of the free
But in order to flee,
Take a number please,
You are number one million, two hundred and six thousand, five hundred three.

You wait for years, but are still denied
They don’t understand you just need a place to hide, but
Unfortunately you have a cousin on red, white, and green’s lower south side.

All you want is a better,
Life
Without guns yelling outside your front door,
Without murders and neighbors being turned into whores,
Without the constant suffocation of this drug war.

In my backyard is a fence,
It divides mothers from children,
It divides the collective art form of society,
It divides Mexico from US,
It divides.
Life from death.

But they will not let you cross to,
Live. ​
​

​Bianca Paz, who grew up in Brownsville, Texas, is enrolled at Concordia University, Austin, Texas, toward a major in communications and a minor in writing, which includes both non-fiction and fiction stories and poems. She is Editor-in-Chief of the school’s student magazine, “The Spin.”

El Rinconcito, the little corner, is a special niche in Somos en escrito for short literary works: single poems, essays, short stories, flash fiction, young writers, and the like. Submit manuscripts to [email protected]. ​