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Volume 16


René Rodríguez Soriano
​Sed en la sed

           A Generoso Ledesma

Quiero ser calle,
que los niños y los hombres
planten sobre mí sus pasos;
que en las tardes, cuando llueva,
casi mares, sordos ríos
laven mis nervaduras y el filo;
que lentos veloces barcos
de papel no encallen en mis aceras;
que me pisen pies descalzos;
que pase una madre entera,
una loca caravana, una explosión,
como ángeles caídos, perros
que se amen como locos, locos
de amor porque amanezca
y nazca un ruiseñor o el sol.

Octavio Quintanilla
​Thirst in thirst ​

           for Generoso Ledesma
I want to be a street,
so that children and men
can step upon me;
so that in the evenings, when it rains,
all but seas, deaf rivers
can wash my edges and my ribs;
so that slow-swift ships
do not run aground on my sidewalks;
let bare feet tread upon me;
let an entire mother pass through,
a crazy caravan, an explosion,
like fallen angels, dogs
loving each other madly, madly
in love so that the dawn may come
and a nightingale or a sun be born

Abigail Keegan
Industrial Horse

I.   Urban Horses

In early urban photos
evidence of the industrial
horse is missing,
only ghostly shapes of
moving legs appear
in the first images of city life.
But updated dry plates showed
horses, like humans
thronged from farm
to cities.
Living quarters
rose on every city block,
every hotel had stalls,
lower class horses squatted
in sheds or shacks
between buildings.
Herds of horses urbanized
faster than humans,
but it took but it
took the Great Epizootic
of 1872, when horses
stayed home
sick from work,
shivering and coughing
in their stalls, and city
after city halted,
freight stalled
on wharves & depots,
garbage piled,
construction closed,
fires flared for days
without water wagons,
only then did humans
unhitch the black
blinders of the mind
to see the great cities of working horses--
the horses of different colors
living in Oz.




2. Horses and Highways

As 
road workers of America
horses pulled stumps, drug road beds
edged up mountain sides and lost
their lives building scenic highways.
President Roosevelt praised
engineers for the careful
planning for beauty along
the Columbia River gorge
for giving Americans the chance
to experience
nature in its largess, yet even
as he spoke,
horse teams locked in harnesses
muscles strained and twisted,
fell down the high hillsides,
the mammoth bodies of delicate bones
toppled like giant trees
their soft muzzles silenced
like trees falling in a forest
flattening the terrain of the natural world.

Ken Hada
​Work, for the Night is Coming

I've never really feared darkness:

Even now, as the last few stars 
evaporate with the new dawn
a certain nostalgia accompanies
the transition

But sure, I'll pick up my hammer 
and swing into action
             my place in the percussion 
             of time, beat upon beat
             until quittin time

Yes, Night comes
as sure as the tool in my hand
conforms to grips
of hopeful delusion

Am I more than what I produce? 

In the act of making 
(or tearing down, to reconstruct)
I have found something
              obligatory, something
              to occupy myself
              my fellow humans

On this assembly line we call destiny. 

Will we rest when darkness arrives 
or regret all the wasted force 
              trying to make 
​              something un-makeable? 

Madeleine Mitchell
Old Ties and New Wounds

“I knew you would come back.” The nun tells my mother. We are standing on the spot where the garage of the convent once stood. I hear my mother ask about her wellbeing, commenting on how much time had passed since they’d last seen each other. She used to come here every summer with her younger siblings when she was growing up. At one point, she had even been one of them-hair hidden beneath a thick veil and a habit perpetually smelling of frankincense. Someone, a woman named Betty, passes by, and says something horrible about being in the eye of the storm.
            “The noise was the worst part,” The older nun, the first nun, says and I can just imagine her withered hands shaking, “It sounded like screaming.” I turn away from the sight of the rubble to see my mother fold the elderly woman in her arms, resting her chin on top of the sisters’ head. I turn away from this intimate moment, feeling like I’m intruding on something I’m not supposed to know about. All around me, sisters pass by-each one sweatier and looking more worn out than the last. Some carry limbs of fallen trees, others clutch rosaries as they escort volunteers through the ruins of the convent. As I watch these people, whose lives have been irreversibly shaken, pass by I feel as heavy as the rain during that hurricane. I want my mother to gather me up into her arms the way she has gathered the nun up-like I am a dried-up flower she is too afraid will crumble beneath her fingertips.
            The restlessness of the sisters and the fatigue of the land seems to fall upon me all at once. I want to forget this tragedy, take my thumbs, and rub at the shadows underneath the Sisters eyes until they disappear or smooth the creases of their dirty, wrinkled habits. Instead, I put myself to work, eager to end this silent suffering and to help recreate what was destroyed.


Priscilla Celina Suarez
Tan Loca

he waited for me, a few hours or so,
as I dug my nails
beneath the rocks.

they eased as I dug
and found what I had been searching for.

ya no te quiero, I tell him
but even my voice doesn’t believe me
– ay!

I flick the dirt from my nails
and then look up at the absent stars
and then I look to him,
so he smiles that teasing grin
I hate a million times ten.
 
¿tu no me quieres?
it asks me
adorable, adorable, adorable
- ay.
 
ya no te quiero.

Gary Worth Moody
​The Borrowment

This night of the new year's first rain, beneath early moths' shadows magnified by the gasoline island's flickering fluorescence, its forty-year old fixture's ballast corroded by cinder dust blown in off decades of salted winter roads, I adhere to the ritual, dare choose CREDIT, swipe the card, enter digits on the pump-face that locate me on the grid, unlock the unreliable nozzle, when, from the Allsup's wind-shattered door, emerges an un-uniformed man, diminutive in the luminant pulse, with broom, and handled dust-pan, borrowed from the cashier to collect unfinished cigarettes, candy wrappers and gum foil glittering like satellites in sheltered light, labor to barter for cup of powdered mocha, peppered jerky, or Lenten fried fish. Beneath myriad almost indiscernible, tattoos on his cheeks: the Virgin on the crescent, a cross stretching a man, flaming heart pricked by seven daggers, his scaled lips, broken teeth, and tongue shape a melody, a Job corrido, his own, lamenting la noche del arañas de viudas negra, the plague of black widow spiders that descended through under-the-highway dusk, onto his body and the shivering body of his nine-year-old daughter, in their arroyo's fireless encampment. He rolls up his sleeve to prove the vanishment of flesh disappeared by the arachnid's venom, a hole the size of a child's mouth, and another, and another, choiring through the serpent tattoo's borrowed dark. Seeing I have nothing left to give him, no promise of shelter, he turns with his broom, limps back toward the lights of the station, as my tires streak the concrete, marking my own way toward those and the fire waiting and home.

Gary Worth Moody
Killing Day, Pajarito Canyon, Rio Grande Watershed

Beyond my locked window, through morning fever, a cougar's length stalks the mesa's volcanic rib, halts to lap a hollowed stone's caught rain, swallows what's left of reflected sky. Filtered through unshed needles of beetle-killed pine, a hare's grey and white flash bolts beyond reach of the big cat's claws. Unsheathed into the escarpment's underlight is everything prey: squirrel, field-squatting lark, even the serpent rumored to share shed skin with castaway contaminant gloves, and spare parts from nuclear bombs gleaming like coaling hearts of imprisoned suns beneath the earth. At night you can hear the opened stone dissolve under the leaching waste's half-life, a ceaseless keening of salamanders burning Behind the window's pane is shielded breath, blind faith in unjoyed safety, despite color embered through glass: fireweed's echo, purple asters' constricted light, penstemon's stretched red. Outside is wind. Something like heat trapped beneath rain simmers into marrowed earth, masks alchemy of fractured light, steaming sweet ruin of the killing day.

PW Covington
From Tropical Drive after Hurricane Harvey ​

My last Cohiba cigarette is lit
3 mornings after the hurricane hit
Outside the house, no power yet
Tailgate down
I take a deep, full, drag
     hold it for a bit
And just sit

High school across the Cuero highway
Parking lot full of ambulances
Staged for a mass casualty event
Sometimes, it’s best not to see
Too much of what is kept
Behind the shroud
Of tropical uncertainty
And served with breakfast MRE’s

I used to chase disasters
I’d fly into the mangle
Chainsaw and generator drone
Mississippi and Louisiana
Clearing roads for others that followed
Red Cross cots in Brooklyn
African famine and war
Full circle now, it’s come back to me
Counter clockwise
In Central time

Clarity, this morning through Cuban smoke
This time it was waiting for me
Today, the rain
     is drifting east

​Low pressure, gale winds
Equalizes like rising water
Power crews with bucket trucks

Roll in from distant states
And calls are made for volunteers
With boats

Plastic water bottles collect
Carcasses tossed in the corners
Fuel cans in the bed of my Ford,
I exhale...

The old and infirm
That wouldn’t leave when told to leave
Needing more from others than they will ever admit
Comfort zones racked by Category 4 forces
     and, the rivers are still rising

Still reminding Texans
That storms of the season
Do not care
For the proud or the strong
This black tobacco solitary sunrise
     dawns for all

Vedado swirls drift
     after the tempest

I will never be enough
     for Texas

Jimena Burnett
Object Correlative 

It’s a funny thing to love, a funny thing to hate, an old cigarette butt, laying in the dirt, ghostly, bone yellow, summoning memories of my father. Him with his Pall Malls, always stepping out for a smoke.

The royal red of the package, the crinkle of cellophane, the coat of arms - a knight in armour looking left, flanked on either side by rearing lions. Each wearing a crown. Wasn’t my father, like them, on display - regal, royal as a king?
​
Perhaps, he read the words on the package - the warnings from the Surgeon General on the back or the latin on the front - per aspera ad astra? Through hardships to the stars...

Didn
’t the tobacco smell safe, smell sweet, earthly and heavenly, all at once? Didn’t the tobacco taste of possibility even as the lighters and matches like limbs of his body, always on his person, parsed out our days in increments of smoke and ash?

I waited for each match strike, hoping that the flame, like lightning traveling across a big sky, might reveal some truth or transcendence in the landscape of his face.

“
Famous Cigarettes,” the Pall Mall package declared. Within the universe of our family, wasn’t my father famous? And didn’t he love us with the same, steady devotion that he offered to cigarettes and beer?

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  • Welcome
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