by Reynaldo George Hinojosa Jr.

Tejanos
 
the breadth of my blood spans the rio grande, tunneling
every root into earth laid track, veins of cartesian slanted
monasteries praying for safe keeping and return. all love’s
angles need me dry as a bridge across centuries drifting,
drifting along tributaries, my eyes lifting border weight sunk
into lines like dams. god dammed me turn and bound sand
coffin lullabies shrinking miles bordering my measured body.
i crenellate, i bridge too far, moated, i solemnly melt harbors
into ice. brandished masks, graphite flares, long-speared songs
slit cascading tracks i can no longer see. beneath coffins, i river
along drifting castles, monuments laid against footprints and
obelisks turned fountains. too many feet leave dirt to consume
my blood, longing to be a mother for every lost child stuck in
the mouth of my soiled lands, softened under moonlight perils.
                                   
                                    &
 
my silver edged swards gulp air, grip for supple bodies in side
shore flotillas, clambering shoulders for another damp-
pressed lodged throat stuck from the same people split down
centuries long edges; umbra against moonlight, shaded dark
graphite bursts of genetic lacuna. arbitrary lacunae bodies
speak silence, a generation of silence, no longer listening
to wardens warranting god damned word-spills flooding me,
my river, my heart soaked in tragedy, soaked in sores weeping
my river, my name, my sense of belonging. my body is split in
imaginary sequence, sequins of words cleared out by spectacle
harvesters and mage icons. harvest my image, my name, my soil
forgotten to cowboys, forget vaqueros, lassoed my last memory
buried in the sand, in the clay, in oil stuck in the throat of nations.
 
                                    &
 
image iconoclasts barrel for barrel, priced, stocked, laminated to
touch, touch towered drill rigs silting my soil, my violent soil sold
and sunk beneath static statues and markers covered with moss, for-
gotten and left to wonder. i was born here hundreds of years ago,
but can’t remember why. when can i reduce the root to a seed? of all
the memories i carry across my body, i recall mesquite bean pods
indifferently, discarding yellow-tanned honey as nothing more
than a forgotten name. cabeza de pozo is only a myth to my hands,
to my lungs, my hands no longer carry generations of silence, my body
is already filled. i’ve eaten my share, drank the rio grande, subsumed
what is left, whispers still fill my cup—branch from the river, branch
from my throat, branch the sky, branched in solitude separate stilled
and stolen loose soil saved for savagery. i am witness to its reflection still
standing in tides grown from my blood. my blood is a memory i sift through,
speaking its name along the camino real. upwards, norteño, ever upwards
to heaven’s song: sol, my sol, my soil, my name buried deep within the soil.

Jalapeño Smoke
 
my mother burns jalapeños on the comal
choking me with centuries long memories
 
its sharp-sticks saturate the air like a mist
body full, expanding corners in my lips and nostrils
 
the piercing plates lap up my tongue
feeding me memorials of earth
 
verde encerrado en una coma
hooked, lined like mexico
jealous of my mouth
            that still speaks
 
its blister berry song lulls fire
torched-heart and fireworked
 
i remember the dreary fumes
steeling my name
cutting through my throat
 
capturing my voice alive
carving out the well’s swollen gland
speaking, speaking the spanish name
 
el lamento, razed buds steamed in effigy
torched-bust hammer-filled balloons
 
pyrrhic tastes, burn-swelled sweat
the arch of its name sinks like a submarine
rises like a whale
splashes long rivers we call home
 
el lamento, for loose soil
it levels me in ancient serenity
fusing its long root in my veins
 
mi raza es contigo, cuaresmeño, fat with liquid blister
circular spirit in the house that never leaves me
troubadour of the flamed-tongued vineyard
 
dragging me to the root
hardened es posible con suave
 
la muerte es tu clave
to the scorched light
burn-scarred across the shipless sail
heart-driven and anchored in me
 
mirrored to the centuries long current
buried in the light of my mother’s cooking
smoke-washed dream of my north star
 
searing every word for home
the earth still recognizes me
 
its fruits still hold my name

Reynaldo George Hinojosa Jr. is a Tejano-born writer and musician. He acquired his MFA in Creative Writing and Bachelor’s in Liberal Arts from the University of Texas at El Paso, and an Associate’s in Music from San Antonio College. Since arriving in Michigan, Reynaldo helped build, and currently helps run, the bookstore cooperative Book Suey. He is a 2022-2024 Lead Teaching Artist Fellow with Inside Out Literary Arts. He lives with his son, partner, and two cats in Hamtramck.

Inspired by the Moorish horsemen, 
the Castellanos
set out in wooden ships
across an alien sea
with stalls of stallions
treated better than men,
fed and lovingly groomed
for the day they would
dance upon the land
to the music of cruel spurs.
 
The Aztecas had never seen
such a creature
and thought it was an enormous,
sweating stag of which the rider
was a part – a mystical beast
to be feared, and yet the indios
became its master with lazos
and chaparras,
estribos and botas,
and when strays escaped
to the north and multiplied masteñeros gathered
and broke them for the gringos.
 
Alla en el rancho grande,
Grande Julio Mireles
went out with his nine sons
after a pot of café del campamento
and cigarros, huevos rancheros.
 
He taught the Tejanos
his craft, his charros
begat Kings in the fields
claimed by barbed-wire
and rifles (to steal a horse meant hanging), 
and when the dueño learned
all his secrets, vaqueros
gave way to “buckaroos”
with their chaps and lassos,
stirrups and cowboy boots,
mis padientes,
mojados.
 
Robert René Galván
11.6.21

Robert René Galván, born in San Antonio, Texas, resides in New York City where he works as a professional musician and poet. His poetry collections include Meteors (Lux Nova Press), Undesirable – Race and Remembrance (Somos en escrito Literary Foundation Press), and The Shadow of Time (Adelaide Books). His  poems also appear in Puro ChicanX Writers of the 21st Century and various magazines, including Yellow Medicine Review: A Journal of Indigenous Literature, Art and Thought, 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, and UU World. He is a Shortlist Winner Nominee in the 2018 Adelaide Literary Award for Best Poem. Two poems by Galván have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and another for the Best of the Web for 2020.

By Sarah Cortez

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

That day you grabbed
the armadillo’s tail
and jerked it upside down
as it snarled and raked
air with black claws.

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

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

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

​By Sarah Cortez

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