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René Rodríguez Soriano
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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
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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
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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
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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
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“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
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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
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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.
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Gary Worth Moody
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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.
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PW Covington
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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
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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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