At home, Dad sought loose cigarette coins, dis-oriented
under the couch skirt. He even spread plastic covers
like rice paper on the carpet, afraid of losing the rent deposit.

Johnny & I expected the ice cream truck that accepted Food Stamps
straight from its booklet around 7:24. Never thought
it was probably illegal then. No real money,
like when Dad & his brother ran away from a food truck, thinking
the burgers were free, until people started paying.

When light extinguishes darkness, we’ll come back.
Through a winding trail. Her hands on the steering wheel,
mine on a folded map.

           Our mothers, on the lighted porch,
will shout then whisper.

The only dirt on our skin, the road.

I’m seven again and I’ve spilled juice on my blue sunflower dress;
I’ve ripped my tights climbing a tree. She tells me ladies don’t
climb; ladies don’t make messes; grabs a wooden ruler. Hours
later I can still feel the melted marks on my skin. I hug her. She
caresses my back. We share a bowl of ice cream.

She stands. Shakes her head. Turns away.

Her melted cone in a green bin.

Locked door

In Ohio,

I taught another writer

how to kill.

How to divide

your tail

like a country.

Split open.

The butt of knife

a new baton

Your insides ran

and I don’t blame them.

And he said: slaughter

And I said: dinner.

And it didn’t change

a thing.

And I don’t know

if I should be sorry or jealous.

At least it was quick.

Meal to mouth.

Your blood

bright red eulogy

we covered

with a lid.

standing up at the back of his neck              colon

2001 is not a space odyssey but

a finger spreading newspaper rows

curiosity through busted blinds

in print

a body pixels  parallel to skyscraper

and smoke on the first day of school

my father cannot unhinge the safety clause of his arm

fast enough

and in print

someone else’s father

who looks like my own

but does not hold his language

gardens at his gas station

heavy arizona sun drench

until he doesn’t anymore

i convince myself they were sunflowers

i convince myself  that his hands were sunken  in  soil

that he hummed

until he didn’t

anymore

these the things

i needed to be true

parenthesis

shovel     red life      gravel

close

colon

my father thanks a god he does not believe in

everyday he was not given

a son

colon

somewhere the metal and sidewalk of profile

still annotate his teenage body

his prayer is his palms at the back of his head

to Dostoevsky and Baldwin in his bag

un-searched

and in print

my middle school guidance counselor

is quoted at the townhall declining

the proposed Boys and Girls club

echoing a concern about the condo kids definition

the mexican and muslim children who cross

the freeway bridge to learn pray usage

one the children without

two the wrong kind

three  no actually what i meant to say is increased traffic

colon

i ask if this is why my father has told me to hide my spanish

in my backpack

in my pink spacemaker pencilbox

in the milkypen constellation of our middle class

he answers by sending me to the dictionary for the word scapegoat

he tells me they all look the same

comma

we earn belts

at the karate studio down the street

he tells me it is a kind of reading

our dog dies that spring

in the backyard my father sneaks up

on me to see if i remember

to smash what surprises

would break his spine

for my awareness

pushes me ahead with fists out

period

my father has built me a fortress of books

and perfect grammar

has taught me to guard the windows with

straight A’s and flawless spelling

period

choose shy over surrender

mija

period

they see one thing

will see another

period

proofread everything

period

i am a cover of mystery and passing

i hold a bouquet of verbs

i am a tongue knot of something i was supposed to say for us

period

period

period

he puts a pen in my hand

hoping  it will save us

he puts a book at my back

praying it will stop

a gun

My cousin the lifeguard sees his mother in the Atlantic Ocean.  One day, a year ago, she didn’t wake up in her bed but actually she spent a lot of time not waking up in her bed for years but maybe that’s a technicality, after all what is waking? I have been prepared. I have been primed for the sadness of this sound bite without really an explanation. I have been told that in her last years, his mother never left the house, never left her mattress-disheveled-sheet-haven, the cats, the ice cream cartons, never unpacked her boxes a year after she was extracted from Vegas against her will but here she floats in the Atlantic Ocean and how does that happen? How does one create a memory like that? I have seen past lovers on couches. After my first dog died, I heard her nails clicking down the hallway, but these ghosts were all where they belonged. She should be a shiver at the breakfast nook, a creaking door, not a curling grey wave.

II

My cousin the lifeguard tells me about a couple of months back when a woman lost her son to the sea and for weeks they could not move her. For weeks she sat curled up in the sand dunes shaking and staring into the saltwater, waiting. She sat until she became a boulder. Someday, after we are all gone, she will become sand. When he tells me this, I wonder if he sees the connection. I wonder if he sees the mirages cross in his mind. I wonder how long they stay, how far from the sandbar one has to swim to attempt rescue until they finally disappear.

 III

 “See that Casino over there?” He says, gazing through a sun-leathered squint. Yes, I say. It is quite large and I was wondering about it earlier. It just opened, he says it cost the city billions of dollars but is hemorrhaging money. It will be closed by winter. I spend my afternoon bending my neck back into my shoulders, attempting to see the tops of these things, imagine how they would be brought back to the earth.

 IV

My mother says that the neighborhoods behind the casinos have not changed since she was a child.  Not a smudge. The pastel siding and stoops sit perfectly preserved. One summer, when she was a teenager, she came back to visit and while walking around her uncle’s neighborhood one afternoon, a woman in a car followed her down the street and proclaimed: “You are Nancy’s daughter, aren’t you?!”

 V

This is because it’s rare that anyone ever leaves they just become the ghosts of the people who do. You linger and you start to become people you never knew. You start to become fixture. You start to wait.

 VI

Everyone who lives here does it knowing

someday this city will sink.

When asked to write about how poetry combats hate in a time of ignorance, part of me wanted to say it doesn’t. I consider the constant debate over women’s reproductive rights, the fight over the territory of her body. I consider my sister who survived the longest 15 minutes of her life, belly-to-ground as bullets punched holes in a Las Vegas concert. I consider the dreamers, the defense of DACA, the need to give others a name other than citizen, friend, neighbor.

My heart half mast. My newsfeed a eulogy. Most days if feels like we have already sunk.

I am sick of writing poems about the same damn thing.

But then I consider the youth. The boat they’re building. A tomorrow named by change. I’m blessed with a job where I work to develop young poets and their voice. Every day they ask me how to best write (and talk) about these things. Lately the only answer I can muster is “together.” Because that is what poetry does: it opens the doors to many separate houses and offers a place at the table. To sip on a perspective different and the same as your own. To revel in aftertaste of empathy.

I believe that poetry can change the world. Just like the world has changed poetry. These day poetry is fighting back. Poets redefine the world for themselves.

Today their words are louder. The honor more heavy. Outstanding poet Kaveh Akbar says we are living in the Golden Age of poetry. And I agree, the work has never been more poignant than it is today. Unfortunately all that light has to constantly battle the darkness that surrounds it. Bu still we, as poets as people, shine on.

This past year, I wrote a poem comprised only of words taken from the Donald Trump’s locker-room-words banter with Bill Bush. I’m told the poem, which will be published in the Not My President Anthology is haunting. I have never read it out loud for an audience because it feels too crash, and too chillingly.

Maybe it hurts to consider (out loud) what we have given power.

Poetry can shift that.

This is still a country filled with greedy hands. But also hands that hold. That honor. That praise.

I hope to show my children this poem one day. To look back at this time and said “I resisted.” We rose our words and but now we are doing better. We hurt. Then heal. The poems taught us how.

Since I started this essay to the time I have finalized it there have been two major Hollywood figures accused and prosecuted for sexual harassment of women. There have also been at least two more mass shooting.

Poetry captures our unrest a collective duende, a wrestle between darkness and light. I think poets have always felt a civic responsibility to break the silence. To comfort the darkness. So we write into the spaces that need conversations to be started. To know there are those like us. And different from us. Poetry is the house we build and tear down, in an effort to seek shelter from both the things in us and around us. May we never stop building.

But it could be the difference

between whether he comes home

or not.

Half this country

sees beard and thinks

bomb. Thinks Muslim

means murder.

And that half

looks just like me.

Pale and picketing

for a blue-eyed bully.

My lover’s beard grows

long with my worry.

I fear that half

will never half consider

the softness of his smile

that Persians are poets.

The sun rises

in the East.

At night, I run

my fingers through his

beard. The razor of the nightly news

pressed against my thoughts.

Today he is target.

I am trigger.

And I’m not sure I can keep

either of us safe.

The day after the election

my lover tells me: terror

is being caught

in the crosshairs

of a white man’s gaze.

Half this country has eyes

like a loaded gun.

After I ask he turns

to me and says yes,

I am scared

But I will never shave

myself away

so more of this

can grow

Because we are pirates of love
We fashion heartache and sorrow
Into songs of passion and triumph
Our Jolly Roger is, indeed, but just
As likely gleeful Rogelio, bravely
Dashing barefoot over waves and
Jib climbing center mast to unfurl
Our banner as buccaneers of joy
We eat hemlock for the suicides
And raise them from sadness or
Dread with fire from our quills
Because our contraband is hope
Exhaled in every dizzy whirl of
Hummingbird wings or dreams
Delivered in each flutter of a
Butterfly glide through borders
And two countries to nest atop
The slumbering volcano shoulder
Because the black and orange
Velvet glistens like a quilt that
Will dress all your dismay in a
Prayer skirt of redemption or
The rainbow ribbons of rebirth
Because we are pirates of love
Our brotherhood is not secret
But loud and boisterous, a bell
Burnished with kind, forgiving
Words made infinite in steady
Syncopated celebration of black
Mahogany drumsticks held by
Gentle giants like ancient angels
Hovering with timbales built from
Distant echoes of true peace and
Glittering crescendos of warmth
Like the lack of hunger or perhaps
An end to so much homelessness
Because we set sail with bliss and
Chase the sun with brazen smiles
littering our wake with laughter,
we drink your world-weary tears
an hour before breakfast then
brew morning tea with melody

Freddy:
Tell us a bit about Brooklyn & Boyle

Abel:
Brooklyn & Boyle is a monthly tabloid-format newsprint arts paper, described in The New York Times by performance artist, novelist and filmmaker Miranda July as “a paper just for the arts in the Eastside of L.A. – Boyle Heights, Cypress Park, South Pasadena. It’s very Latino, historical and radical in a community minded way.” It’s my monthly love letter to LA’s Greater East Side (GES) neighborhoods, a swath of the city that includes the historic GES communities of Boyle Heights, Lincoln Heights, El Sereno, City Terrace, Cypress Park, Highland Park, parts of Downtown, a sliver of Eagle Rock as well as a sizable section of unincorporated East L.A. We have distinguished ourselves with consistent coverage of arts in every conceivable discipline, but we also make it a point to provide thoughtful political analysis of issues that affect the quality of life for long-time neighborhood stakeholders, especially as it becomes, increasingly, more about gentrification and dislocation. Beyond that, let me just say that Brooklyn & Boyle exists to give young writers a voice and the opportunity to grow, whether it be in a formal strategic setting or an informal outdoor classroom under a tree. Brooklyn & Boyle is, by design, a home for good writing or writers who would like to improve their chops in addition to, profiles and stories that truly reflect the reality of our histories and lives.

Freddy:
What motivated you to start the magazine?

Abel:
I started Brooklyn & Boyle with $80 dollars to my name and a borrowed laptop. I had put publications together before but always for someone else… It had never occurred to me that I could actually own a business myself, work out of anywhere with just a mobile device. In 2008, I was already a pretty seasoned freelance writer and had written for The Austin Chronicle, The Austin American-Statesman, The San Antonio Current, Hispanic Magazine, The Houston Press, Los Angeles Times Magazine and scores of others.

By October of that year, I had suffered the loss of my two most important literary mentors: Cecilia Bustamante, the only woman to have ever won the National Prize for poetry in Peru; and Raúl Salinas, an OG ex-pinto who had written UN TRIP THROUGH THE MIND JAIL Y OTRAS EXCURSIONS and was part of the early national American Indian Movement leadership toward the tail end of serving time in various penal institutions where he became politicized. His posthumous memoir, edited by Dr. Louis Mendoza (Red Salmon Press, 2018), was just released and includes an essay I wrote as one of several contributions by those who knew him in the new book’s ‘Afterword’ section. I’d also broken up with someone and was being more than a little self-destructive as a consequence. The newspaper project grew out of a “Literotica Chicana” presentation of erotic Chicano poetry that I helped plan alongside Gloria Enedina Alvarez and the legendary musician and cultural arts ambassador Rubén “Funkahuatl” Guevara, who provided us a title for the reading.

“Literotica Chicana: Love, Lust & Light” was held at Eastside Luv and drew a standing room-only crowd on a Wednesday night when the night spot was usually closed. Owner Willie Uribe had to call in extra bartenders and remove the large, plastic covered chairs from the bar area to make more room. I realized then and there that if that many people were willing to come down to Boyle Heights from all over L.A., there was certainly a readership for a paper that focused on the arts in “Boyle Heights y beyond.” Before I finally got extra RAM loaded onto my desktop, I would arrive at Eastside Luv at 2am, closing time on Sunday nights to pick up the Mac laptop which was used to run the music on days when there was no live band. I had quite a bit of initial support from playwright Josefina Lopez, founder and artistic director of Casa 0101, the revered community playhouse located a short three blocks away from where we staged the wildly successful erotic poetry event.

Freddy:
What does Brooklyn & Boyle do that mainstream media doesn’t?

Abel:
Brooklyn & Boyle is an unapologetic Eastside media project that, as a result of its lean one-man machine character, can easily tap into individual narratives as well as the collective memory of an entire community. A fluent Spanish-speaker, I have traveled extensively in Mexico and know the Lincoln Heights Church where the 1968 Student Walkouts were organized and where the earliest Chicana/o newspapers were produced, specifically for that first season of student protests and marches that called for better educational facilities and college prep courses instead of vocational training for Latina/o high school students. As a long time student and direct product of the “Movimiento,” I think I was drawn to Los Angeles and the Eastside of L.A. because I knew what had happened to Ruben Salazar and understood L.A. to be ground zero in the struggle to develop consciousness around the arts and cultural practices that would counter long held beliefs among too many people that Mexican Americans are not intellectually equipped for brilliance or genius or vanguard thought.

Freddy:
What advice do you have for artists who are struggling to find a vision and/or voice?

Abel:
Even as I come to the realization that I was destined to teach and figure out a way to get back and finally finish a university degree, I would counsel young people who are serious about finding their own voices or are interested in exploring futures in media, communications, or creative writing to read as much about as many subjects as they possibly can. Reading avidly, even voraciously, from an early age is the best way to absorb grammar and usage while learning what readable, expressive syntax sounds like. I would also suggest that the kind of curiosity that leads to late nights and long discussions with one’s peers over particular works of fiction and non-fiction is not at all a character flaw but a sign that knowledge and learning feed a particularly poignant need or craving that, at its core, will allow you to determine your own, unmistakable style and tone, two aspects of written expression that carry as much weight as actual genre or form or mechanical technique.

“My students will probably tell you, with varying degrees of understandable eye rolls, that I am always telling them to be more specific. I think that is one of the most crucial keys to expressing your lived-truth in a way that also opens the doors for others. As a reader, I am hungry to see this in writing, and it’s caused me to look at how I deal with that in my own work.”

1. What is immediate for you in your work right now?

Navigating the open and locked out spaces of mixed-race identity, legacies of immigration, the overlooked brilliance of my mother, memory and its loss due to aging but also due to manipulated narratives (at the hands of self and others), ghosts of the living and the dead, miracles of human endurance I see in my classroom everyday, memory (trauma and joy) as it lives on the body, cataloguing my grandparents’ every angle so I can always render them.

2. How did you come into poetry?

The first poem I can remember writing was in my eighth grade English class. One afternoon, my teacher, Mrs. Vigne, who used to stand and sing to us on top of desks in order to get our adolescent attention, gathered us into a circle and turned off the lights. She asked us to hold hands and bow our heads. She brought out a flashlight and held it like one would a candle. She told us that we were gathered there today to have a funeral for the word “sad” and that we were not allowed to use the word anymore. She asked us, in memory of the word, if we could each go around providing more specific alternatives that we could use in its place. As a teacher now, I know this to be brilliant, especially when addressing teenage content sensibilities. I wrote a poem that afternoon called “The Ominous Day,” and, while it of course wasn’t good, she made such a big deal out of it, which meant so much to me as the quiet kid, who might have disappeared any other way. Additionally, it was the day I began to learn that I could manipulate and sculpt language to do exactly what I wanted it to do, to get closer and closer to representing the abstracts of life which were, at that age, beginning to grow their ineffable scales.

After that transformative moment, I was so lucky to have gotten the opportunity to attend the California State Summer School for the Arts and Columbia University summer youth writing programs in my high school summers. Through those venues, I was given the opportunity and space to produce work as well as learn how to really read poetry and as well as the inseparable relationship between both practices. Despite all of this practice, I was still pretty shy and secretive with my work.

3. Where does your nickname “Little Bird” stem from?
Hah! It was a nickname lovingly bestowed upon me in college by a friend who considered that a hobby. It had originally just been a name she used, however, when when I transferred to UCSC, I worked on a collaborative poetry show as part of the larger Rainbow Theater, a multicultural theater troupe, and there was another Crystal in the cast. I offered up the name, everyone around said “Oh, that totally makes sense” and it became my name for the rest of college. I’m pretty sure no one called me Crystal for the next few years.

4. Does being a teacher inform your writing?

Atop all of the other things it requires, good teaching requires perpetual reflection and consistent presence. This extends of course to the actual practice of teaching but also to my humanity, though the two can often be inextricably linked as it is. For one, the challenge AND privilege of teaching teenagers has kept me in constant reflection/remembrance of what it means to become a person, the turmoil and awe-striking wonder of it. Whether it’s navigating day-to-day classroom interactions or developing curriculum, my interest in reaching my students on a human level often circles me back to foundries of my own youth and how I came to learn about the world. Furthermore, my students hold me accountable to my own writing. If I’m not willing to practice, experiment, stretch, how can I ask them to do it on the daily basis I’m asking of them? An example of my most common feedback suggestion:
My students will probably tell you, with varying degrees of understandable eye rolls, that I am always telling them to be more specific. I think that is one of the most crucial keys to expressing your lived-truth in a way that also opens the doors for others. As a reader, I am hungry to see this in writing, and it’s caused me to look at how I deal with that in my own work.

5. What are your writing rituals?

Real talk: Since I started teaching, I have been in, what seems like, an excruciatingly long period of transition with this. Teaching and going to grad school full time had made it almost impossible for me to develop/maintain any sort of established routine. It has also been really challenging to move back and forth between my writing self and my teacher self. Honestly, I’m learning everyday how that door works. For a lot of this time, the hinges have not worked at all. Lately, I have been trying to embrace this by trying my best to listen to what my conscience needs. I am trying to embrace being patient and accommodating. For example, if I’m sitting down to write and I’m antsy, I take myself outside. If my brain has decided that all the potential lines of today are only going to come as I’m driving (a common problem), I record what I have or I pull over if I can. Sometimes, if I’m feeling blocked, I will go over to mis abuelos’ house and sit with them. I’m finding that human connection is much more of a catalyst for me than talking about writing itself. Sometimes it is just ditching the writing all together and doing nothing but reading for a bit. I have come to accept that I am in a healing and recovery stage with writing and the best thing I can do to set new rituals is set the altar and be available for them, and for myself, as it comes.

6. Who is in your literary lineage? (By that, I mean: in your work, who do your poems follow in the footsteps of)

Poetry all begins for me with Frank O’Hara and Sandra Cisneros. I spent a lot of time as a kid going to bookstores with my dad and reading the merchandise while sitting in the middle of an aisle. Finding a collection of Frank O’Hara poems at age 16 was the first time poetry ever caused me to fall back and sit in the middle of a bookstore aisle. I felt invited by his love letters to his city and friends, his direct address, his piles of visceral angst into pique turns of nostalgia with simultaneous ease and obvious control. I felt like I was coming home to a memory I had but would not have recognized without his help. More than 10 years later, I revisit his work for that same feeling. Sandra Cisneros, for me and for countless others, was the first time I was able to see a place for me in the literary landscape. At a very young age, her work showed me that my stories and observations are still interesting, even if the mainstream canon is slow to represent them. Additionally, in my poetry I often find myself storytelling, and driven by some ghost of narrative. Cisneros’ work showed me that is possible to nourish both. In terms of the continual journey, I am in constant bookshelf conversation with Lucille Clifton, Aimee Bender, Junot Diaz, Sherman Alexie, Brendan Constantine, Claudia Rankine, Ada Limon, Danez Smith, and many, many others.

7. In Poets4Progress’s mission statement, it says “We are an artistic community outreach organization that focuses on solution-orientated performance”. Can you elaborate more on what “solution-orientated performance” looks like?

Over the years, when working with poets, founding coach Kelly Grace Thomas, myself, and current co-coach David Hall, have worked hard to remind students of their responsibility as writers, particularly writers who engage in themes social justice.
To me, “solution-oriented performance” does not mean wrapping up the message in a bow, but offering more than a bouquet of triggering feelings and shock in pursuit of a high score. For our students, this has looked like a call-to-action threaded through the backbone of the poem, or even actual community involvement/service. About a year ago, we had the awesome opportunity to work with The Bigger Picture project (through Youth Speaks) on a campaign for Type II Diabetes Awareness. Our poets wrote poems on the topic, curated a school-wide assembly in which they presented information regarding the socioeconomic and health realities of diabetes, as well as participated in a “Recess” demonstration in Berkeley, where they engaged in recess activities in People’s Park and acted as youth ambassadors for the cause to community members who walked through the park to see what was going on!

8. You and Nikita Liza together birthed Atomic Tangerine Press. Since its inception, how many chapbooks have been hand-made?

We first started out at our kitchen tables when we were seniors at UCSC, binding our own senior thesis chapbooks + respective copies and helping our friends bind and print their chapbooks (I had a color printer at the time and an ink connection!) In recent years since then, Nikita has made some gorgeous chapbooks of her own. I haven’t made any of my own since my first but have used the skills and resources we picked up during that time (during our master class with Gary Young at UCSC) to help my high school students layout/bind their own collections. Perhaps one day we will formally publish manuscripts and run printings, but, for now, this has more or less been a project of facilitating access and imagination for ourselves and our community.  (I’m unsure of an exact number…)

9. In your remarkable poem “Tongue Memoir”, you have these lines: “To live in the borderlands means / you’re constantly having a stroke in one language or another- / I reach to say “i see it between us” / this tongue action entre teeth instead producing /verlo.” What does it mean to have a body that holds both your mother tongue and the tongue of the colonizer? What does it do to the body to exist between languages?

First of all, thank you. It means a lot of confusion and a lot of learning that it is often up to me and me alone to validate my own identity. It means learning to honor one tongue and acknowledge/challenge/forgive the other for its privilege. It means feeling both tongue tied and betrayed but also keenly aware and uniquely articulate.  My body itself comes from a legacy of people who both accept and dismiss my identity because of my fractured relationship with my mother tongue. And then there are the folks on the outside…. the other day I was having early bird dinner at Coco’s in Mission Hills with my Abuelo, and we were speaking Spanish, which is commonly what you do when conversing with your elders, no matter how broken your language is. A man sitting to the side of us was giving us obvious dirty looks…so persistently it was distracting to me. The worst part of this experience for me, besides the prejudice, was the awful irony. This man was disapproving of our use of our mother tongue, perhaps thinking we ought to be speaking English, but, had he been able to understand any of it, he instantly would have seen how wretched my Spanish is due to collateral of assimilation and how much I struggle to connect with my family on a grammatically correct level. Even more ironic, I kid you not, we were talking about how much my Abuelo enjoys apple pie because of how quintessentially American it is. He is an immigrant who came here by himself at 12 years old and worked in the fields instead of getting formal schooling above an 8th grade education. He slept in dirt so he could pick produce, such as apples, and is still able to talk about how appreciates this American product largely facilitated by immigrant labor… and this man was judging us, perhaps for not being as colonized as we were supposed to be.

10. In 2012, your first chapbook “The Body Memoir” came into the world. During the inception of the chapbook, what were the big questions you asked yourself and do you feel the chapbook was successful in answering them?
I wrote/compiled “The Body Memoir” as my senior thesis project at UC Santa Cruz. My big question at that time, that particular wide-eyed threshold in my youth, was “how does memory live on the body?” I was really interested in how the human body develops reflex memories regarding emotional trauma (and how that can be passed down), how the body is haunted by the space inhabited by other bodies around it (missing people), how physical injuries heal but can lie in wait. When I was in high school, I had been pretty serious about running until I sustained a hip injury that was due in part to poor form (user error) but also due to the way my body is built (flat feet, uneven hips). In the years after, I struggled with feeling betrayed by my body, particularly as it changed after I was told by doctors that I should not be running anymore. I think this experience was one of the reasons I became obsessed with the idea that your body can make you feel like flying and it can also ground you just as quickly. As it turned out, this large question is totally not something that can be answered in 30 pages or with 21 years of life experience, but I love and appreciate my then-self for that ambition and for asking a question with so many years to it. I certainly scratched the surface, but, with more life experience, am still answering.

11. What is next for Crystal Salas?

I’m excited to report that I’m in the very early stages of gathering work to develop a new manuscript. I had a second manuscript before I started teaching four years ago, however, after such a life-changing journey, the whole of it is not reflective of my place in the world anymore. So, I’ve been gathering what I have written over the past couple years, seating it with current writing, and listening to the conversation. I’m in the process of working on it in the great Kim Young’s WWLA class and am eager to see how it grows from there.

Crystal Salas’s website can be found here

***

I.S. Jones is an Assistant Editor for Chaparral, Voicemail Poems, and Staff Writer for Dead End Hip Hop. She is a fellow at BOAAT Writer’s Retreat, Callaloo, and The Watering Hole.

Freddy:
In the introduction to your book, As I Stand Living, you mention that you initially wanted to write a fiction novel, utilizing Faulkner’s constrained writing schedule (i.e. “The Faulkner Experiment,” as you called it). But, during the construction of your book, something else happened–something in the form of a “radical memoir,” entitled As I Stand Living. Tell us a bit about the memoir and your experience writing it.

Christopher:
In a nutshell: as you say, I utilized the constraint-based compositional techniques William Faulkner used to create As I Lay Dying—no planning, no editing, only in the evenings, over a specific duration—but what ended up on the page as I wrote came across more like a confession than a work of fiction. I ended up documenting my life in all its mundanity, from tallying my twitter followers to descriptions of what I’m eating to what I’m watching on television to fantasies and dreams and gossip about the writing community and so on. It covers the period of my life when I turned thirty-five, became a father, finished my Ph.D., and went on the academic job market for the first time. The experience writing it profoundly impacted my thinking and my approach to composition. I write differently now because of that writing experience.

Freddy:
What was it about “The Faulkner Experiment” that prompted you to create a radical memoir?

Christopher:
I called it “a radical memoir” at the time of composition because I couldn’t think of how else to describe the confessional and fragmentary style. Diary? Documentary? Autobiography? Recently I came across the term “intimate journal” defined as “a literary form used almost solely by the French….fragmentary by its nature, forever unfinished,” in Ned Rorem’s introduction to Jean Cocteau’s Past Tense: The Cocteau Diaries Vol. One. I wish I’d have had that concept before, because I think it more accurately describes what I wrote. Rorem goes on to say, “The distinguishing feature of a diary as opposed to a memoir is on-the-spot reaction, the writer’s truth as he feels it, not as he felt it.” So, by this definition, I wrote a diary not a memoir. Definitional quibbles aside, I allowed myself a rawness unlike any I’d attempted before. It’s written in a very different style, I think, than my previous work. I approached it from the angle of documentation, whereas my previous stuff tended to primarily approach language as a machine capable of provoking the free play of imagination through complexity abstraction openness and indeterminacy. The unplanned aspect, the emotional situation I found myself in, and my sheer exhaustion with writing fiction, all contributed to the production of this “radical memoir.”

Freddy:
Does As I Stand Living provide readers with a candid portrait of the early 21st century persona, as well as the early 21stcentury writer? In other words, are your experiences, as human and writer, timely?

Christopher:
All writing is timely because all writing is written in the time in which it is written. Or so said Gertrude Stein. Another way to answer: yes and yes, but also probably not and probably not. Universalizing creeps me out, so I’d switch your articles: “a candid portrait of [an] early 21st century persona, as well as [an] early 21stcentury writer?” In that case, yeah probably. Or, yeah, you could read it that way. Maybe. But then someone else might read it differently. So I don’t know. And honestly, I don’t really care. The filmmaker Ana Lily Amirpour told Indiewire recently, “Just because I give you something to look at, doesn’t mean I’m telling you what to see.” In other words, I’m not really keen on writers talking about their work as if there’s a definite answer. For me, art exists in two phases: (1) as an experience between an artist and the creation of their art, (2) as an experience between the art and its audience. I don’t conflate those two phases. What I think about my work is private. Audiences see the outcome and decide for themselves. What I can say is that I subscribe to William Zinsser’s description of writing as “thinking on paper” and this book does that. It documents my life from a splatter of angles in the same exact way my brain works: the way I talk and teach and think. That said, I never say or write everything I’m thinking. So it’s both “me” and “not me” both “true” and “false” both “candid” and “completely staged” both “timely” and “timeless.”

Freddy:
Some beginning writers find it challenging to write about the self. What advice do you have for them?

Christopher:
I have tons of advice. First, you have to love yourself. Know that you are amazing. Know that you are unique and important. Know that what you create is valuable. Know that you are the greatest writer ever to live, but as Kendrick Lamar says, you must also “be humble.” Work to balance confidence and humility. Next, stop thinking about the notion of “the self” as a singular authentic condition. “You” are not “you” in the singular. Each of us are multiple. We have selves. Plural. While our brains may serve as singular storage facilities for our various versions, brains only aggregate, they do not unify: the “me” who stands before a classroom of college students, the “me” who Caitlin calls husband, the “me” who Jasper calls dad, the “me” my brother calls brother, the “me” my close friends know, the “me” my casual friends know, the “me” my parents know, the “me” who interacts with other writers on the web, the “me” who interacts with other writers in real life, the “me” my colleagues know, the “me” others know through some reputation, and so on and so on. I have dozens of versions of myself and while all of them accurately represent “me” none constitute “me” as a singular condition. Perhaps more importantly, there exists no “real me” or “authentic me.” We are all fake. We are all pretending and performing. Embrace it. You and I are phony and irreducible. We cannot be pinned down. We must embrace that truth as self-evident: we are many, each of us, many and open and continually growing. Therefore, writing about “the self” equates to writing about “one of the various selves.” No one on earth will ever know “the complete you” because the only way to know that version is to coexist in the storage facility of your brain. Perhaps science will one day get to the point where machines can effectively facilitate interaction between human brains and in that case perhaps a complete experience of another person may become possible (the novel I’m currently revising explores that very scenario), but at present no luck. So relax as best you can. Consider the boundary zone within which you feel comfortable exposing “yourself.” Is writing about your childhood off the table because you wouldn’t want to hurt your mother? Is writing about your sexual abuse off the table because you’re not ready to confront it or not ready to admit it on paper? Is admitting to drug use or violent thoughts off the table because you fear it might jeopardize your job or your other relationships? What are you unwilling to say? Make a silent list inside your head, lock that list inside an imaginary vault, and then set up an alert to remind you to avoid those topics, and then everything else is free game so just think on paper and ignore the haters. As long as you create your boundaries and abide by them you have nothing to worry about. The “self” you’re presenting is never your “real self.” So don’t worry. You’re only ever presenting a small fraction of the “real you.” No one will ever know you. That’s the saddest most amazing thing about being alive. (And, as an aside, in large part one of the driving forces behind modernism in literature: the attempt to reconcile subjectivity/objectivity, consciousness, failure of communication, and epistemology.) Bottom line: you are completely, utterly, totally alone inside your head. You present versions to the world outside yourself, but all of them lack totality. Don’t see this as negative, see it as positive! Embrace it! As RuPaul always says, “you’re born naked and the rest is drag.”

Along with being a recipient of the Whiting Writers Award & the National Endowment of the Arts, Brown’s work has appeared in The Nation, The New Republic, The New Yorker, and other publications.
Brown granted Chaparral a brief interview.

I.S. Jones: Back in March, Buzzfeed published your poem ‘Bullet Points’. As a whole the majority of the poem is bereft of flowery language (like much of your work) and plainly states: “I will die by my own hands and not that of a police officer, but know if I were to die in police custody, they killed me”. As an emerging poet, how does a poet speak their truth, speak of their rage and use art as a vehicle to address socio-political inequality without it jeopardizing their careers? Is this even possible?

Jericho Brown: I don’t really think of art as a vehicle. Then again, when I think of trees, my mind doesn’t go to terms like “Oxygen Producers” in spite of the fact that I know this about trees. At any rate, they wouldn’t have to produce oxygen for me to love them.

I don’t know that artists I love most ever think outside of risk and jeopardy, and the history of English literature shows that risky behavior in writing is probably the best behavior. I’m saying I’ve never thought about making something that doesn’t live in the land of jeopardy. At the same time, though, I don’t think of that land as a place that could hurt anyone’s career. I actually think of that as the only place a career can indeed grow.

Of course, we may be thinking of two different things when we use the word “career.” The way I see it, the writer’s life is the writer’s career. I could spend a lot of time trying to separate the two, but that would be time wasted. How we live matters and has a great deal to do with how and what we write. Some of us live lives that are in jeopardy at every moment. There are people—many people—who would prefer us dead. It is possible to be a humorous and joyful person while knowing this is the case, and is it possible to write both threat and joy in a single poem.

Jones: As a recent MFA graduate, for me, there was a severe lack of diversity in terms of the students as well as the curriculum. As a professor and as a former MFA student, now that you have been on both sides, what advice would you give both administration as well as students on how they can make MFA programs more inviting to POC students? Can MFA programs, in your opinion, do anything on their end to combat the disparaging numbers of black and brown bodies in graduate programs?

Brown: I’m sorry to hear that you did not get what you needed in terms of diversity where you went to school. Of course, this is the reason why it is still important for us to put ourselves through another kind of school while participating in classes where only white writers are read. This is where havens like The Watering Hole come into play, and this is the reason we have to honor these havens. Our poet friendships outside of the classroom are paramount. The conversations and book recommendations that come from such friendships are a large part of what we mean when we talk about community. And yes, it is true that if one’s community outside of the MFA classroom is diverse enough, she may not feel the need for getting the MFA at all.

I am glad I got one, though. In spite of the fact that I know the degree was not necessary for Wheatley and Whitman and Dickinson and Hughes, I understand that the organized structure of my MFA and PhD programs was necessary for me to stay the course and to ingest a large amount of information in a short period of time. Different people need different things.

I don’t know that I have any advice for the administrators and students about which you ask, other than, “Stop being racist,” which is, of course, not helpful since most racist folk have no idea they’re racist and break down into denial or tears whenever I’ve tried to explain to them that they’ve done a racist thing. It seems that the only thing that can help white people stop being racist is themselves.

Here is what I’m trying to get at: People of color have to stop being responsible for “advice” to white people who can’t seem to notice that there are only white people on their syllabi. And here’s a greater truth: That brand of racism in 2016 is actually more willful than anyone of us would like to believe. If you are a “recent” MFA graduate, then your teachers are teaching at a time when writers of color are not hard to find. Even on the (sad) literary establishment level, these writers are Google-ably serving on the juries that pick winners for the National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and the National Book Critics Circle Award every year. This ain’t hard work for teachers who read as part of their job.

Jones: Langston Hughes appears to be a huge source of wealth for you, in that you seem to share a deep connection to the poet’s work as well as who he was when he was alive. Can you share how you came to discover his work and, from what you understand about Hughes, what are some things people miss about who he was / his approach to the page?

Brown: Langston Hughes’ poems were just plain fun to me when I encountered them in the library as a kid, and I remember that sometimes for pageants and programs at church, a child would recite “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” and I’d get all excited. I love a lot of his work because it’s sassy and rhythmical. It makes a kind of music that asks to be spoken by particular characters—a large portion of the work is persona poems (in the voices of black women). This was a good time for a black gay nerdy kid like me who grew up Southern and was raised by working class Christians.

As an adult, I found his essay, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” liberating. It let me know that I could indeed use the stuff about which I was most obsessed as material for my own poems.

Jones: In your poems, ‘Heartland’ and ‘Another Elegy’, is it intentional that ‘Another Elegy’ seems to pick up where ‘Heartland’ ends? In ‘Another Elegy’ the ending is a sudden shift in which the speaker stands over his brother’s body having realized he killed him; this ending stands loosely in the shadows of ‘Cain and Abel’. The final line says: “Except to lose / again as you stand for nothing / Over his body, witness / Or reporter, murderer or kin”. Did this ending surprise you? And while the speaker’s brother is killed, would it be incorrect to say the speaker loses more than the slain brother?

Brown: Yes, I mean for all of the poems to comment on the preceding poem or to add a dimension to it. I’m glad to know you’ve done the work necessary to notice this. And yes, every ending surprises me in some way or another. I write to make discoveries, to come to know what I didn’t know I knew. And definitely yes, every poem must be about more than its surface dramatic situation. Poems must touch something outside of themselves to truly be poems.

She takes his eyes,
Peels them
Off of her skin,
A scab she wore,
A bracelet she found
And her hair was dark,
Like her black olive eyes,
She never gave
Her love to a man,
Like the story told
By her Grandmother,
When the crickets
Sang sad boleros
Near the wash tub

Cynthia said “no” to her Tio,
Who chased her
Into the tall grass
In her 14th autumn,
No, to the nasty dollar,
To lipstick promises,
To a world away
From her father,
Plucking chickens,
Her Mother
Combing the baby Jesus

Cynthia was a sister,
Could have been a mother,
The little girl smiling
With grasshopper legs
Folded under a blue dress

She never knew
The name of sadness,
Only, that she had
To tuck away her breasts,
Two brown birds
Napping under her blouse

And before night dragged in,
Like a sack of nothing,
After punching out
Of the Maquiladoras,
She walked down
The broken cement and rock
To the river to dream

Night is a black cape
El Chamuko likes to wear,
Likes to kick it into the air,
But Cynthia knew Chamuko,
So it was natural
For her to blur the memory,
The steam of his teeth,
His cigarette butt eyes;
He sleeps now,
Loosing grip
Of his warm Carta Blanca,
Losing his life like a man
Who is already dead

Cynthia was formed
By an indigenous God,
Patterned after
The wind That circled
The pyramids,
Her brown hands
Were meant to touch
Sacred things,
Offerings to the clouds,
To feed the fortune cookie
Mouth of her newborn

But her time was trampled
By the weak and wicked,
Who lost love
A long time ago,
Down dusty trails
Of twisted takes
Of little girls like her,
Like Cynthia;
Torn Tennis shoes,
Lips of a Mazahua girl,
Descending to the river

She was the sun’s greatest love,
But now the sun
Shines over the mountain,
Over the white promise
Painted for everyone to see,
And the calm creek
That was her heart,
Will empty into the river,
And into the dusk,
Her spirit will blend,
A voice, her voice,
Reminding us all
That Cynthia was here.

These were the days
My mother kept,
Her Church calendar
Crooked on the wall,
Her flour tortilla legs,
My father’s lust,
Her milk we
Walked away from,
My Grandmother,
Lost in her memory
Of children,
Her black n white husband,
Photos like skin,
Voices, she never said
She heard

This is where the door opens,
To fat clouds and blue
Watercolor wash,
And I spin my top
On the kitchen table,
With open turkey cans,
Welfare spam,
Our neighbor, red lipstick
On puffed brown lips
Yawing on a chair,
The derelict dog
With a noose rope collar,
The red, white and blue,
Behind the mud face
Of Kennedy
On that TJ rug hanging

I imagined myself,
A man who lives
Far from this home,
I imagined
What would become,
my longing,
To pencil leg trot,
With a full blown God
In my eyes,
The Paper-Mache
Angels in grade school
And golden staircases
In my mother’s bible,
My blank cum,
I thought I sinned

That this boy should
Live an eternity,
Always returning,
To long black hair,
The body
Of a praying mantis,
To follow the same
Ditch bank
I went home with bow
And arrow,
To sheets like white
Ghosts in the wind,
My sisters, tucking rabbits
In a basket

That all of this,
Never ended,
And I can walk with myself,
In this time
And in a time past,
A time that never
Goes completely,
And my mother,
In her flower print dress,
Will always be
Calling us in from that field;
That field that died
And returned every year

And I? I go guilty
Of saving dreams,
And looking for traces
Of myself,
Like reaching for silk.

there is crying.

there is a ghost.

there is my father.

there is me.

it is winter.
then summer.

it is the beginning (of self, running)

from the back of her hand?
it is winter outside

because the silence tells me
and I lose track of day and night

my mother, who is 3000 miles away,
wants to plan a future trip

that will hold off an unbearable loneliness
and all I can do is nod

back to the hand
that becomes more familiar

and invisible each day–
like the sound of Phillip Glass’s imagination

caught between leaving
and being left behind

what is this life where I kill
before a life can be taken away from me

I once told a stranger next to me
that I knew something that matters

but it was a mistake
born of wanting

I am on another bus
on another night

in a city that can’t know my name
or the texture thick like sugar

of the space that we hold between us
that grows, unrepentant,

each time
we make a decision to live.

and saw the same invasion
the same lights

and you were
what I imagine proud

we are running out of time
in our knowing of each other

for me to say
that I need you to be

ashamed of nothing
that I carry

the one with the crooked shelves
and the small fan

and ran my fingers
through the dust on the windowsill

to feel the burning of steel
to taste the silence of the dying

I returned to look for myself
on a bed long gone

this morning I had thought of something
from that time in my life

where I was afraid of discovering
all that my heart wanted

somewhere between those walls
I can still hear myself crying

in my sleep, dreaming of something
that I would lose before I woke

I want to come home to this again
days of being unmade instead of broken

that night before the abductions began again
when I spoke in my sleep

about the victory that was to come to us
and how maybe this was love

and she kept my words a secret
because she was afraid of committing to something passing

this is terror and desperation
I am losing words like that faith that fled long ago

I need you
I need you to tell me how to say goodbye

to the details that shift shapes like memories
like faces that lit up a dark March night Los Angeles

1980
and the beginning of loss

and how all I wanted
was a moment that would keep me still

BY: That’s a brilliant and difficult question. To answer, I should probably excuse myself for a long and intensive study of non-dualistic philosophy. That said, I am delighted and relieved you find these concepts called to mind. While I always hope that my poems create ripple effects of thought and emotion, I am never sure whether or not I’m deluding myself.

My response probably needs some background. Because I grew up in a military family, I was never in one place very long and that makes for a strange experience of the world. For instance: religion. Protestant Church on base was generic enough that a Methodist or Lutheran or whatever could be comfortable attending. But off base I was also exposed to fundamental, born-again and Pentecostal beliefs. And what a shock it was to find that Jewish friends did not believe Jesus Christ was their savior. I also attended Catholic services with friends, and in Japan, discovered a bit about Buddhism and Shintoism, and later new age religions. In each case, I found they were belief systems truly held and pretty insistent upon being the one true path. So I had a lot of questions about reality. There’s also the fact that I was raised in a military society when many friends were sent to Vietnam. I loved them but hated the war and participated in anti-war activities while sending care packages to my friends fighting overseas. I also saw that culture could be relative; its concerns are in many ways shaped by landscape and environment . I suppose this is a very long way around to talk about celebrating the earthly as divine. It’s never seemed to me that science and belief can be an either/or proposition. And yours is a very sophisticated question that exposes my greatest fear in writing. Nature, art, ecstasy, history, doubt, despair, death, etc. are eternal subjects but is it possible to make my questions or explorations or poems not sophomoric?

KY: Travel and place also seem central to what’s at stake in Bodily Knowledge. The poems convey these spaces through a scientific apparatus, often attending to nature or a cataloguing of names and history. How do you see travel, place, and space functioning in your work?

BY: Again, because we moved around so much, I think place and space function as something solid among all the variables as well as ways of establishing truth or authenticity or even the authority to “witness”(in the myriad senses of that word). It’s been said that travelers see everything and understand nothing. So cataloguing becomes a way to build a foundation among the uncertainties. It still amazes me to no end that people can see exactly the same thing in utterly different ways. Unfortunately, that often also engenders the hate, fear, contempt for others that arises again and again in politics. Sometimes reading current events or history makes me physically ill.

KY: I’m also very interested in your use of narrative. Many of the poems rely on a taut and vivid narrative mode and some of the pieces are even titled mini-essays. What role does narrative play in your work?

BY: Narrative plays a huge role in my work but I consider myself a somewhat unreliable narrator. Aside from the fact that as I said above, no two people see the same thing in the same way, “unfolding” a place or idea or person or question is one of my true pleasures. And I love experimenting–attempting to bring, say, a lyric intensity to memoir or review or travelogue, hoping to make it neither this nor that. My so-called essays, for instance, have been dubbed “rhapsodics” or ecstatic prose or scientific lyricism or lyric science by editors I respect. I consider that success.

KY: Let’s talk a little about the genesis of the book. When did you begin to see the poems working together as a whole? Did you have any guiding thematic or aesthetic principles? Did you run into any challenges in the process of putting together this manuscript?

BY: Genesis is an interesting word. Over the decade before ‘Bodily Knowledge’ there were probably three or four manuscripts that I put together and then hastily scrapped. Shortly after I wrote what is now the last poem in the book, I tried again. For the first time I felt comfortable with the way poems fit together and established a sort of natural movement. There were a few order tweaks afterwards on the ever-so-good advice of fabulous mentors. The biggest challenge then was two years of intensive editing. I wanted each poem to carry its own weight. Fortunately the editor I chose (the extraordinary Dorothy Barresi) was fierce and insightful–to my surprise even with poems that had been published or (gasp) won prizes. Then, during two-plus years of submissions, editors kept me going. There were just enough encouraging comments and near misses that I didn’t give up.

KY: What are some of your influences—literary and non-literary?

BY: That’s a list that could go on forever. Aside from all the poets I love, I’ve met amazing people and lived in amazing places. I’ve been an avid reader since I could read: short stories (oh, I love short stories), pretty much any novel (including westerns, science fiction, thrillers, police procedurals, detective stories, mysteries, adventure), and non-fiction (biography, history, science) and almost any magazine I find lying around. Then of course, there’s music, especially rock ‘n’ roll, and museums of all sorts. That sounds silly until I tell you, I have written poems in some way related to each of those genres: many, many, terrible poems that no one will ever see thank God!

KY: Do you have any advice for other writers who are in the process of composing a manuscript?

BY: I guess that old saw: fail more, fail better. What you’re working on now may not become anything but it may lead you to something that does. I’m the worst person to ask because I still don’t know what I’m doing

Freddy:
You are currently one of the editors of Writ Large Press, a small publishing press based in Los Angeles. Would you like to tell our readers a little bit about your press?

Chiwan:
We started WLP in 2008 to publish LA-based writers who were being overlooked by other presses. We’ve published the debut books of some incredible poets such as Kim Calder, Billy Burgos, Khadija Anderson, Ashaki M. Jackson and Rachel McLeod Kaminer, in addition to books from more established writers such as Wendy C. Ortiz and Mike Sonksen. But what we have learned over the years is that it’s not enough to just put out books and to sell them. We have to use the book to fight, to disrupt, to enter spaces that want to exclude. So that’s what we do.

Freddy:
Your last collection of poetry Abductions, which you labeled a “science-fiction poetry book,” disrupts the sanctity of poetry and gives the literary elite the middle finger, all while expressing your marginalization due to the said elitism. I think it is a radical and profound collection of poems, and everyone should read it. Will your forthcoming collection tackle the same issues? Who or what is the next target of your middle finger?What is the duty of the poet today?

Chiwan:
Hm. The eternal question. I don’t know. Maybe the role of every artist is to report the world in a way that it disrupts the world.

Your mama too sick to seek a hangar or harbor in that man.
She fought the fool in her. Rolled weight onto the night you was born

Rather then decipher your daddy’s whereabouts. His garbled mess
Of words couldn’t muffle the pain caused by the night you was born.

Any wave of excuses, any apologetic scats curling fast:—be his best
Al Green, imitated organ tones heating the night you was born.

Love & Happiness be a mouth full of Mississippi, be bad beer & hoochie-coochie.
Nonsense ran them streets and not into the hospital. On the night you was born,

Your mama, a sliver and a small ember hanging to the wind. Recovery—: a
Blood dance or coin flipping down a deep well. On the night you was born

She let the drugs kick, but wouldn’t wait for your daddy’s tears
And paper bag prayers to finally stumble into the night you was born.

She would punish his ass real good:—slapped his full name on you
To force love to burst longer than the night you was born.

Love gon’ keep him present, Dougi:—This, the day you tell her your daddy
Is dead:—and how right she be forty years after the night you was born.

        not a verse but a video of you
pulling a fish out of an ice bag

        some will call this biography—: father holding
all gifts your son’s movements captured:—you fight

        this notion as you offer 10 lbs of love and work
caught in the early morning but your son he never bites

        he will not touch the prize the way his hands
shake the way they tremble

        with questions—: hands scratching head
or neck or covering mouth or rubbing

        eyes or opening to the air the world’s
possibility in the catch you deliver

        your son’s joy exploding at the sight
of a fish as big as he is your son’s joy

        wide eyed and wide handed trying to contain
itself but his hands can’t help but open

        reaching but never touching is this his
mother’s caution keeping him at bay and safe

        for the moment as you swing this grand sight
shimmering in your daddy hands

* * *

        the white belly of this fish matches
the “8” on your son’s shirt and the tendrils

        on his mother’s blouse the white belly
matches this sun drenched moment

        happening on the porch here the 1
minute and 28 second video will let you

        stay for an eternity here the bright
peaks and is audible—:

        Pick it up.
[Laughter]

        Mommy…Daddy…I love
big fish.

* * *

        is this what it was like to be a king
proclaiming his finished reign for his heir

        to care for you fight
this notion too but there is a kingdom of fish

        in your tenderness as you smell the fresh
of its long body as you display its length

        to your son:—finger hook
the gills and steady the glistening skin

        second sleep when the body is
complete lost in itself

        when the body defenseless with no
need except refueling my son and daughter say

        I’m the king of second sleep during movies
especially they catch my heavy breaths in a net

        of laughter or pointing fingers they predict
the path my head will teeter during the trailers

        O children of the dozing dad recall
the number of naps when you each were

        small melons recall the repose
of your curling posture in my thick arms

        my thumb praising your eyebrows
and forehead your baby skin your hand

        around my pinkie as I move gripping
solid as in—safety as in—safety

        as in—I take it back—: that recollection
the best rest ever

1

Certain sea island Africans, who wove culture
into baskets and braids, who cut Igbo into English
like butter into flour and watched it rise,
who were least equipped to becoming chattle
would close their eyes, murmur some words,
and ascend like black Jesuses
fly back to Africa, a flock
of buzzards.

Authorities claimed these disappearances were suicides
a calm walk into the swampy salt
a quick shimmy and fall out of a tree
bodies still tangled under reeds and in branches
ghosts making fishing impossible.

2

Those who read the code differently
doubted suicide while in custody.
They found no evidence
other than muted horse tracks, broken branches,
whirling water, and a disappeared body
except the occasional neighbor still suspended in air
spinning on the wind, head tilted off
towards Glory.

3

Lesser known the children of Khaless
visited earth, erected the pyramids,
unlocked the zodiac, built warrior tribes.
Goliath, man of the in between,
was the grandson of a full-blooded Klingon,
and cousin of young David.
Goliath, double- visioned and near-blind
was a student of Mok’Bara
any touch could be countered
through breath and meditation.

Brown-skinned Bathsheba, daughter of the oath
woman of Qo’nos, violated
in a foreign land by a corrupted king,
avenged her husband’s murder
by taking David’s throne,
his lineage, and thus his life
for the Klingon Empire.

Makeda, queen of Sheba
dark and comely, with the mind of Lilith
(one of earth’s early Klingon visitors)
able to test the wisest of wise Solomon
until he knelt before her in marriage

These Sea Island Africans were raised by humans
but were of Emperor Khaless and Lady Lucara
like Hannibal, like Shaka of the Zulus,
like Mansa Musa of the Klingon House of Keita,
like the son of Mogh.
These Igbo transported away to a Bird
of Prey navigating the stratosphere,
a chariot swung low
coming for-to carry them
to the Klingon Home World.

I pray you don’t die
quiet.                  Haunt.
Shut down all Orlando bathrooms.    
Then North Carolina bathrooms.
Then Congress.
Scrawl on the walls
         This is not your space.
         It’s my grave.
         Stop making my death
         about something other than me.
Make them feel as threatened
as any queer person of color. Make them feel
isolated, unloved. Make them not trust
even the safety of their own desperate hands.
                     Erase them,
not from reality, but from history,
from visions of the future,
from definitions of person and citizen.
Shake chains against the Senate
floor. Mimic the sound of bullet
shells on a dance floor. Bring about a holy hour.
Whisper your last words
Por favor, Dios! No me mates!
         Padre nuestro, que estás en el cielo.
         Santificado sea tu nombre.
         Dios te salve, Santa María,
         Madre de Dios, ruega por nosotros,
         ahora y en la hora de nuestra muerte.
         Amén.
Look each of us in the eyes and ask
         What have you done?
         What have you done?
The prayer I prefer is
Jesus, please grant me the strength
to kill him
before he kills me.
Awomyn.

It was your sneer,
That side view of your face,
A photo of a Jew
In my grandmother’s Bible,
Hair, like a spread of hands,
Eyes, squinting,
To the sun rays through
The dirty window stitched
With alarm wires,
Painted clay,
Greasy gears

It was how you ignored us,
Then questioned us,
With your brick and mortar
Of careful sighs,
Making us regurgitate
Our lives, our poems,
To be judged by you,
Teaching us how
To judge ourselves

Bly’s, Leaping Poetry,
leaped– a spider from my hand
And onto the floor of
That bungalow in my past,
My distressed boy, in jeans,
In a desk near a steel door,
Outside, the brown birds,
That never made
My poems, then, trees,
With their humming branches,
Dung kissed clouds
In a Fresno sky,
And planes, I never boarded;
these pages, offset poems,
In light blue ink in our hands

And the ghosts of poets from
A revolution you slept with,
Love-hated like death-
Stood about the room;
Vallejo rubbing his fingers,
Hernandez, curled under a desk,
Scratching love on the floor,
With the courage of broken lead,
Neruda, his fat pen drawing lines
on your face

We all becomes timeless,
When words never die in us

In the summer, I brought
The after-smell of dried grape
And hooked knife,
My drunken father,
Stumbling like a scream
Trapped in my ear,
The thumb of my mother,
Knitting with her sister,
My brothers, shirtless
Salamanders, moving
into the wash

And now, the years,
Flaccid on bone,
A calendar furled out
In the wind that counts,
I sit here, in my submission,
And hear of your passing

How you must be rising
Above the pixel fuzz, Phil,
The etchings in your ledger,
The tough images
Of a long life of work,
Your kneaded wisdom,
Now solid and here like stone

You must be holding your own
Arms out in rows of shelves,
In the “hush, hush”
Of that infinite library,
Where my brother,
in tennis shorts,
Might see you,
My Uncle Noe
with his pocket
Full of God,
and all those, who,
Like you, have sparked
A permanent torch near
that stone in grass

And all these words remain,
Anyway, in imperfect lines of sugar
And Times Bold Roman,
A dash of stars, words,
Vaguely telling our story-
In that bungalow and you,
Forever turning away from us,
Then catching a glimpse
Of what you felt was important,
Biting down on your lips,
Taunting us, daring us, to write

Freddy:
You’ve recently published a collection of powerful poems, Mi Sol, and have a forthcoming collection, A Tale of Submission, which will be released in August. Tell us a bi about your poetry collections.

John:
Mi Sol is the very first book (in I don’t know how many years I’ve been writing) that I actually had the guts to put out. I’ve been destroying my poetry, for a good part of my life, and so, I am the only reader of my poems. Well, now Facebook allows me to throw out some drafts here and there, but in the past, it was just me. I have published on and off in anthologies, but I have recently made my work available to the public. Still, I feel my poems are unfinished. Mi Sol is a collection of Spanish poems that I published so that I can have something to offer, especially when I read in Baja and Tijuana. The poems were translated by Mario Escobar, a professor here in the LA area. He is very picky and pushy, actually, but doesn’t everyone need a friend who is just a perfectionist, especially when it comes to art and poetry? So, for about three years, I have been reading his translations across the border.

One of the poems from Mi Sol–a very ambitious, anti war poem–was published in a new anthology, by Editor Ana Chig (Tijuana), called “La Ciudad.” We hope to hear from her soon, as she will be presenting her anthology in Southern Cali very soon. The title poem, “Mi Sol,” is a very “airy” poem, one that has a “buzzed” out direction. Reading the poem, you want to stop and ask yourself, “What the fuck is this dude saying?” But keep reading, keep reading. It is my response to when the Aztec Calendar made the drastic change. We were told to go out and present ourselves to the Sun. The late poet, Francisco Alarcon told me, in a FB chat, to go out and present myself, to be humble before the sun. So I did. And in doing so, I started apologizing to the Sun–not just for me, but for my fellow man; humanity has never been as perfect as nature, as refined and profound, perfect, as the sun. So, I start throwing all of us under the bus, you know. At the end, I say, in a real dramatic way: “absorb me, into your gases, as I have always been there, in the molecular structure of the sun.” It’s a return, really; death is a return to the sun. So, it’s like a prayer, you know.

They like that poem in Mexico, and, at the book fair in TJ, I actually got into a debate with a Mexican intellectual (the guy was smarter than anyone I ever met) and was arguing on my choice of symbols. He said I was erratic, irresponsible, flagrant–that, while the power of the language was, in fact, effective, I need to carefully choose my symbols, and not mix them up. I was like, “I’m glad you liked the poem, homie.” I’m not going to stress about criticism. Hell, every line spoken is spoken as a result of one’s naive understanding. Let’s face it, nothing is absolute. So, then, I asked him why he was hanging around with the poets and not the intellectuals and he said, “Poet’s are crazy and, traditionally, more fun. Haha.” “Then shut up!” I thought. Then the book twists into deep existential musing. Poems about death…no book should be without at least five of those. And then, well, I talk about the injustices in our world. In a few poems, I speak of the girls of Juarez. How they are killed and Mexico doesn’t respond with enough investigation. Then, of course, love poems to my wife, and one where I got the color of the eyes wrong. Oh wow, she didn’t like that one (joking).

I have read, MI Sol, in Mexico and Baja before it was published. I have participated in many shows at CECUT, which is the cultural center in TJ, and I am, well, in love with TJ. The poets there are hardcore and very tough. I like the old school poets, like back in the day, and while Spoken Word is something very special, reflecting artistic takes on our current culture, it’s the brooding poets I like. TJ has the new Vallejo’s. They speak of injustices, with the honesty that only true experience can produce. And when you hear political criticism and, politically progressive poetry from them, you are usually hearing truth. I like truth. Also, I love the Spanish poets: Hernandez, Neruda, Vallejo, Blas De Otero…tough poets who wrote very human poems. They were trying to preserve it, actually, as humanity was at stake, at least the dignity of being human, was being trampled by the Fascist. Most of them wrote during that era. Many of them were killed. Lorca, for example and Hernandez, were both killed…Neruda too. You all should have already read the Spanish poets. But, TJ? Back to TJ; man, you got the tough poets out there and I am just a seeker of such movements. I am happy that they have accepted me. So, yeah, Mi Sol was written and published because I wanted, needed, to have a book to share at my readings in TJ and Baja.

As for A Tale of Submission, well, it is an interesting book. It is rather dark, and that just happened. The prologue is written by Michael (EM) Sedano, who is the Editor for the popular Latino Literary Blog, La Bloga. In his prologue, he addresses the reasons why I am so dark…I am dark because, out of darkness, comes light. There are some uplifting, philosophical pieces and some love poems, again written to my wife, Rosa. Many of the poems in A Tale of Submission were translated by Escobar and are in Mi Sol. Many of the more significant pieces, or the stronger pieces in Tales, are in Mi Sol, actually.

The title poem, “A Tale of Submission,” is about me going into a mental institution to see my son, who had wiped out in College (he’s just fine now, by the way) and, so, I go, like a father must, to visit his son. He is distraught, I am crying, he is crying, and so I start drawing from the deep sadness of the place. The colors, the chairs, the orderly, all add to this feeling, this poetic “touching” if you will. And then, I start questioning the validity of my own sense of “reality,” of the irony of what supposed to be, as it is called, “acceptable reality.” Nothing is concrete, that even the religious flyers on the cork board are bizarre, and, so, I start pounding the subject with imagery and, at the end, I find more reason to be in there with my son. But, reluctantly, almost cowardly, I hunch down and make my way out. As I am leaving, the absurdity of everything on my path is shelled out. My connection to the very light, the filament that helps me see, doesn’t inform, doesn’t explain how it is related to me, that everything around me was meant to alienate me from my own truth…And that my acceptance, my willingness to be alienated is my Tale…my submission, even with reluctance, is my choice. There is no other. It’s a wild poem, very emotional. I read that poem at a reading in Los Angeles, and I started to cry–I mean, fucking cry like a cryer who is holding back his tears. Afterwards everyone was like, “Are you okay?” Can I get you something?” But, you know, as Macho as I can be, some things are just sad. It’s a part of life and your response–your feeling of sadness–must be played out of you, like sweat…You have to sweat it out.

Freddy:
In an earlier conversation, you mentioned that you studied under Philip Levine. The poem “That Bungalow and You,” published in this issue of Chaparral, provides us with some details of your experience with Levine. If you don’t mind, would you share with us your experience working with Levine.

John:
Yes, I was his student in the late 70’s and early 80’s. It was like poetry boot camp. Nothing was left hanging. Words were like science in that class, and everything was weighed against world literature. Levine was like a Meat Smoker of wisdom and literary knowledge. His accolades were all meant for a man of his power and talent: American Book Award, Pulitzer Prize for Literature, US. Poet Laureate. We would offer him our souls, and he’d pick at us, like pieces of a puzzle–showing us how, ineffective, we can be, how some pieces didn’t fit, and, of course, how to strive for perfection. I watched that guy ridicule poets in front of the class. He didn’t have a heart for stupidity. Not everyone is a poet, and so, the lesson is not the alternative. 70 students would begin his class and he’d kick out 80 percent, so that he could be left with a workable crew. I must admit, brag, that is, that I was never kicked out and was given only A’s. He liked me and my brother, Victor.

Levine was a literary God at the time, and remained one until his death. Well, he is still on top, as far as I am concerned. Reading Levine is like a pop guitar player, listening to Bach. You just have to sit back and listen, you know. The poem, “That Bungalow and You, is about a memory of sitting in his class, which was, usually, a Bungalow at the outer edge of the University. Again, I use the imagery of the room to extract meaning and the relationship between us. Those were great times. When you are young, your skin is alive, more than when you are older. Your perception and innocence is as gold as they are going to get. He got us in a time when there was a whirlwind of meaning, floating, sometimes unknowingly, around us like a swarm of bees.

What I learned from him is that there is much more to language and poetry than even the intent of the writer, a magical element, scientific, in which a poet must mine the good and bad of the poem; one must learn what the poem demands. This process is the weight lifting, the toning of the poem, and this is never easy, you know. He would have torn my book apart. I’m sorta glad he didn’t see it. Aw, maybe I would have liked him to give it a once-over. One of his most memorable lines for me was, “talent is 10 percent of writing a successful poem.” I guess that goes for every profession. Many students bailed out; in many instances, he told them, flat out: “You are not a poet…Choose another profession.” God help me, if he would have addressed me and my work with that tone. I would have probably quit. I mean, that’s how he made you feel. There are no teachers like him and there will never be.

En el jardín que recuerdo
sopla un viento que mueve las hojas
del jardín donde ahora
estoy escribiendo

En el jardín que imagino
sopla un viento que mueve las hojas
del jardín que recuerdo

Y en el jardín donde ahora
estoy escribiendo
sopla un viento que mueve las hojas
sin jardín:
                   armisticio
de fronda imaginaria y fronda recordada

pero también las hojas verdes
del jardín donde escribo

pero también las hojas blancas
en que estoy escribiendo

y nace otro jardín

***

Written garden

In the garden I remember
a wind blows that moves the leaves
of the garden where now
I am writing

In the garden I imagine
a wind blows that moves the leaves
of the garden I remember

And in the garden where now
I am writing
a wind blows that moves the leaves
without the garden:
                              truce
of imaginary greenery and remembered greenery

but also the green leaves
of the garden where I write

but also the white leaves
on which I am writing

and another garden is born

***

Her work has appeared in Best American Poetry, 2015, Electronic Corpse, Prairie Schooner, pluck!, Jasper, and Home is Where, among others. Wiley granted Chaparral an interview.

I.S. Jones: So tell me how you and Monifa Lemons came to co-create The Watering Hole.

Candace Wiley: We always refer to the Cave Canem South workshops, launched by Kwame Dawes, as our parentage. In February 2010 and June 2011, Cave Canem had two rare southern workshops, in Columbia, South Carolina facilitated by Nikky Finney, Frank X Walker, Patricia Smith, and of course Dr. Dawes. Monifa (co-founder of The Watering Hole) and I were both in attendance and it was that first taste of the “black poetry planet” that we would continue pursuing years later when we created our own space.

I was in an M.F.A. program at the time, so to workshop with all of these African American poets and facilitators was in stark contrast to the typical feel, atmosphere, and intention of an M.F.A. workshop. It refreshed me. Monifa, on the other hand, was in the Spoken Word world, which in our area often targets performance more than workshop. The experience was poignant and necessary for both of us.

In 2012, Monifa and I went to Pencil Shout, hosted by Nikky Finney. She invited some writers from Kentucky and South Carolina to gather together in Kentucky and talk about poetry, blackness, womanhood, and mindfulness. A few weeks later, I attended Callaloo in Providence, R.I. with Vievee Francis and Greg Pardlo. Those two weeks were soul shifting. These were pivotal moments for us. In 2012, I moved to Columbia, South America. Suddenly, not being a part of a writing community, after three years in the M.F.A. and Spoken Word communities, I felt off kilter. The great thing was that since I was a Fulbright Fellow, I had the time and freedom to pursue the books that I wanted to read and write the topics I wanted to write in the style I wanted to write them in. I grew a lot during that time period, but at the same time I realized how much I needed a writing community.

In 2013, Monifa reached out to me, while I was still overseas, about putting together a retreat to replace the defunct Cave Canem South workshops. I looked at her original plan, cut the fat, and outlined a strategy for us—two women who had no real status in the writing community—to build this vision. We put out a call through social media and it worked! That first retreat was facilitated by Tyehimba Jess, Remica Bingham-Risher, and Lita Hooper-Simanga. Their generosity and graciousness changed everything for us.
That first retreat was so barebones. Everyone pitched in to make it happen. Anyone and everyone—fellows, facilitators, Monifa, and I—were moving chairs, lighting the fireplace, frying fish, scrubbing plates, and going on store runs. There was no room for hierarchy in such a small operation, but that really forced everyone to See each other and value each other. It’s been that way ever since. We learn and grow at each other’s feet.

Jones: What have TWH Fellows (past and present) taught you about yourself and your own writing process?

Wiley: One thing about TWH which surprises me, and it shouldn’t but it’s something I hold dearly, is that I have the power to create the world and community that I want to live in. That may come off as abstract and egoistical, but this is what I’m trying to say: if I want to live in a community of giving people who are concerned about each other as human beings, who are interested in the emotional, artistic, and career development of each other, who are genuinely motivated to help each other, who can think of nothing better to do with their lives than talk about the art, produce the art, and help each other in the art, if that’s the place I want to live in, then that’s the place I need to create.

We try to select our fellows very strategically and actually charge our graduate fellows with the task of choosing the entering fellows. In the application, the poetry is the major component. Then we look at the cover letter to see if this is the kind of person who would enter the space thinking of community. This is the same thing we look at when we solicit facilitators. We ask facilitators who we know have a heart for community. We try to collect the puzzle pieces for the dopest retreat well before anyone packs a suitcase.

What I get out of TWH Tribe (that’s what our fellows call themselves) is this reinvestment in an artist community, an artist’s way of life, and human-to-human openness. Every year, I’m just more stimulated to live the other 360 days of my life as if I’m still in the retreat space. It’s always a cold shower stepping away from the TWH Retreat, but I try to hold onto some of that TWH tribe warmth. At TWH Retreat, I’m surrounded by all of these great writers who are so dedicated and passionate that it’s hard to leave and not carry some of that dedication and passion with you.

Jones: Your own work has been published widely in places such as pluck!, The New Sound, and Prairie Schooner, and most notably The Best American Poetry 2015. You mentioned in conversation that once your poem “Dear Black Barbie” was published, it wasn’t as a big a deal as you had initially made it. What did this particular publication teach you about visibility and voice as an artist?

Wiley: Let me start by saying that my B.A.P. publication was and is still an incredibly big deal! I’d taught Best American Poetry for several years. As soon as I began to teach poetry, I was teaching the B.A.P. anthology as a textbook. I love David Lehman. His work in building this corner of the industry is necessary. I love Sherman Alexie, who has always been a voice for poets and writers of color and who edited B.A.P. 2015. I love Denise Duhamel. “Dear Black Barbie” is an After Poem inspired by her poetry collection Kinky. I love Prairie Schooner, which nominated the poem in the first place—-a poem that I’d started under the tutelage of Ed Madden in U.S.C.’s M.F.A. program. This publication was a dream for which universe had lined up the stars and colluded on my behalf. It was an enormous deal! Your question seems to invite a response that indicates that I’ve transcended publication in some way. Nah. Not there yet. I was ecstatic!

The thing is, I was notified of my acceptance probably eight months before the world knew. That’s a lot of time to get used to the idea in silence. (They’d asked us not to announce it.) I had time to revel in my own bigness and come to terms with my own smallness. These achievements lead to a kind of humility before the industry. Though I’d excelled with this poem, looking out into the rest of the field makes me cognizant of my own smallness among all of these greats-—living and historical. Being a Best American Poet is amazing for me and is yet another source of motivation. I can’t rest on that laurel and expect to still progress as a writer.

What is very sobering is that when I tell non-poets that I’m a Best American Poet, it doesn’t mean anything to them. It doesn’t matter. They respond with more energy when I say, “I fried some fish last night.” That also keeps me from thinking more of myself than I should. It just reminds me to keep putting the work in.

Jones: On top of being a poet, professor, and director of a nonprofit, you also write about Afrofuturism. Even though the plight of persons of color has largely shaped Sci-Fi as we know it, why do you think it is lacking in diverse voices? Do you feel your own work seeks to engage the constant danger that black and brown bodies face or does your work approach race and race relations in an even more subversive way?

Wiley: It’s hard to be a writer or reader in a genre that doesn’t seem to be invested in you. In general, Fantasy and Sci-Fi pretend that people of color and otherwise othered people don’t exist at all in an enchanted yesteryear or a scientific future or that they don’t exist with any significance (in numbers, purpose, presence, etc.).

Afrofuturism works to write people of color into these genres. My poetic work explores space, the deep sea, mythology, and speculative futures as part of the African diaspora. I try to address questions that I’ve had in ways that are reasonable within any of these alternate universes.

Q: Why haven’t we found bodies from the Middle Passage?
A: Because Africans who were tossed or jumped overboard during the Middle Passage were transformed by Yoruba deities into colorful undead merfolk.

Q: From where does the legend of the Flying African begin?
A: From a Klingon transporter on a Bird of Prey warship.

Q: Where do giants like Goliath come from?
A: Well, when a human and a Klingon really love each other,…

Q: Why do police shoot unarmed black people?
A: Because they are mutants who can shapeshift.

As it stands, the mainstream U.S. culture doesn’t see us in the past (Fantasy). They don’t see us in the future (Sci-Fi). How can I reasonably expect for them to see us in the present? If they don’t believe we exist as three-dimensional humans in the pasts or futures of the most imaginative genres we have, why would I believe they see us as three-dimensional humans in present reality? Often Fantasy and Sci-Fi texts establish a framework through which the author presents her vision of the best of all worlds (even if only momentarily, even in dystopian texts), and in those spaces, non-white, non-cis, non-het. folks are a rarity. It’s a seemingly strategic erasure when my image and the images of the people I love don’t exist anywhere except for this moment—-this moment in which I live and breathe. And this moment, too, is precarious. Just look at the Orlando tragedy. By simply living in our differences, we can be erased by the fear of that very beauty.

Jones: What is on the horizon for Candace Wiley, in terms of poems or research? Is there anything you are excited about?

The Watering Hole is fundraising for our fourth annual winter retreat, Dec. 26-30, located as always on Lake Marion at Santee State Park, South Carolina, among Live Oaks dripping Spanish Moss, pristine lake views, and glimpses of curious wildlife. This year, we’ll have phenomenal, award-winning facilitators: Evie Shockley, L. Lamar Wilson, Bettina Judd, Sharan Strange, and Dasan Ahanu. The application period closed in August, but the readings are free and open to the public, so we’d love to have you swing by!

The Watering Hole is also planning a summer retreat series. Stay tuned for news about that.

As a teacher, I’ve been pursuing two ideas in my literature classes this semester. In one set of classes, we’re exploring the ways in which black women navigate, compromise, and protect what they individually view as personal freedom. In part, this involves understanding the political and social constraints for black women that are embedded into contemporary U.S. culture and where these come from. We do this using bell hooks. Then we read for where hooks’s theories stand, fail, or need scaffolding in Gloria Naylor, Toni Morrison, Patricia Smith, Ntozake Shange, Nnedi Okorafor and other women writers of the African diaspora, including Warsan Shire and Beyonce.

In another set of classes, we’re following the idea of “Waste People” in U.S. Literature, with a lens trained on the ways that low-income white and black people intersect. As our theoretical foundation, we’re using Nancy Isenberg’s White Trash, Douglas A. Blackmon’s Slavery by Another Name, and Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow. We look at how Africans in America appear or fail to appear in so-called standard American Literature texts, as well as how lower class Caucasian Americans appear in so-called standard African American Literature texts. The idea is to give students an historical context of which they are most likely unaware, connect this context to the talking points in our current political arena, and to follow the strategic historical division of low-income black and white people, who have more political and social interests in common than not.

Finally, I’m finishing an Afrofuturist poetry collection and giving readings at various universities and bookstores right now. If you are hiring poets, contact us at twhtribe@twhpoetry.org. We’d love to come visit you!

In her book, Indentidad y memoria en las poetas mexicanas del siglo xx (Identity and memory in Mexican women poets of the 20th Century), Gloria Vergara says that González de León “transforms the poetic material to give a place to the fragmentation and indefinition of the body,” what she calls an “itinerant identity,” an identity in constant dialogue with the world, constantly changing. For Vergara, González de León’s poetics are an endless journey, “a spiral and a flow of inverted mirrors; networks that never end mark us in the paradoxical task of naming ourselves through the ineffable.”

In his introduction to Plagios, a compilation of poems by González de León published in 2001, Octavio Paz reflects on the poem “Written Garden”:

The starting point is the act of writing: there is a remembered garden that brings forth, on the page and in the mental ear, an imagined garden. Between the garden we remember and the garden we invent is an uninhabited space.

As Paz tells us, Ulalume’s poems are diaphanous, a “poetry to see…” But if we try to touch them, “they disintegrate.”

Hers is a poetics of disappearance [which] unfolds into its opposite: appearance. But what do we see? Not the reality seen nor the reality imagined or remembered. We see a third reality, although we cannot describe it, there, quietly before us, like the fronds moved by the invisible wind that blows among the leaves… A reality without density, without body or flavor, more form than idea, more vision than form. The eyes see but their visions dissipate, mined by the imagination, which is not—like memory—one of the forms assumed by time.

In 2014, Terry Ehret, Nancy Morales and John Johnson began translating the poetry of Ulalume González de León. For John and Nancy, who were unfamiliar with her work, it was the beginning of a wonderful adventure. For John: “Ulalume’s poetry reminds us over and over that we live in a world of others, among the words of others, and that we are all participants in the act of meaning-making, which is above all a pleasure.” For Nancy: “This project has been an incredible exploration into the creation of meaning from words. It has stretched us and given us new perspectives and ways of owning our voices while living in harmony with the voices around us.” But for Terry, who discovered González de León many years ago, it was an opportunity to fulfill an abiding desire:

In 1982, as a graduate student, I first discovered Ulalume González de León in the iconic text Prose Poem: An International Anthology, edited by Michael Benedict, which featured a long poem of hers, “Anatomy of Love.” Instantly, I was enthralled by the language: richly erotic imagery blending anatomical and scientific vocabulary in an unconventional syntax; and to discover just how this poem’s magic worked, I experimented with one section, “la recherche du corps perdu” (the search for the lost body). I dismantled the language, organizing the words by parts of speech; then I reassembled them in new patterns, rather like the process of recombinant DNA, to create a kind of “mutant” poem. This became “Lost Body,” the title poem of my first collection.

Most of all, what drew me to this poet is a sense of the ephemeral nature of identity, how dependent it is upon the ever-shifting ground of language and memory, and a quality Octavio Paz described as “a geometry of air.” Translating her poems has been a goal of mine ever since first discovering her, though it is challenging because, in Paz’s words, “if we seek to touch them, they disintegrate.” Nonetheless, John and Nancy and I hope to bring these poems into an English that retains at least some of the complexity and delicacy of her Spanish originals.

***
Translators:
Terry Ehret, one of the founders of Sixteen Rivers Press, has published four collections of poetry, most recently Night Sky Journey from Kelly’s Cove Press. Literary awards include the National Poetry Series, California Book Award, Pablo Neruda Poetry Prize, Nomination for the Northern California Book Reviewer’s Award, and five Pushcart Prize nominations. From 2004-2006, she served as the poet laureate of Sonoma County where she lives and teaches writing.

Nancy J. Morales, a first-generation American of Puerto Rican parents, earned her Bachelor’s degree from Rutgers College, a Master’s in teaching English as a Second Language from Adelphi University, and a Doctorate in Education from Teachers College at Columbia University. She has taught at Dominican University and College of Marin, California State University, Sonoma, and other schools, from elementary to graduate levels. Currently she is a board member for the Northern California Chapter of the Fulbright Alumni Association, and teaches Spanish to private clients.

John Johnson’s poetry has appeared in many print and online journals, including BOXCAR Poetry Review, Chaparral, Clade Song, Triggerfish Critical Review, and Web Conjunctions. He is a long-time student of the Spanish language, and has studied letter-press printing with Iota Press of Sebastopol, producing chapbooks and bilingual broadsides.

he’s listening to every word.
The master of revels and his murder kit.

Catastrophe’s
yield increase

from the fucking throne of goodness.
In a cloud chamber,

God would be cloud.
A little visual frankness

always appreciated—
God like the Fuller Brush man

right there on the torched doorsteps
of Tornado Alley!

Instead,
the planets do their old soft shoe

(my mother’s white blood cells kicked
ash to her lungs

in 4/4 time),
and the tinfoil stars

placate remotely:
one more fatal outbreak of

faith along the Gaza Strip,
one more

hemorrhagic sunset at the melting poles.
Hello? Hello?

God keeps himself
to himself; that’s how he stays

perfectly composed.
Or is God just the quietest drunk at the cocktail party

we keep throwing
in his name?

Endowed Distinguished Annihilating Visiting Professor of Cultural Production, Emeritus,
famous, once,

for lecturing
ad infinitum, with fly unzipped?

It only matters if I’m still listening.

bursting it cell by cell.
I wake crawling the length of my bed or I have never, actually, slept.
A neat expensive garment,
“carries an exemption from personal contact

with industrial processes
of any kind,”
which means I’ll pay, but how? A question
cut on the bias—

even the King of Pop is making a decent living again, despite dying.
I returned the rose-gold bracelet yesterday,
but not the navy jacket.
The possum, the crickets, the rats’

drunk and duly appointed
Dean of Exchequer
rattle the trained shrubs outside my window,
setting off a moral racket, plus bird cries.

What species?
The kind that slide deadbolts into trees.
Impulse control v. material humanism.
Take Emperor Tiberious, who wore a crown of bay leaves

to ward off lightning.
His heart stopped its obsessive
beating at the age of 77 and the crowds assembled outside cheered, falling silent
when he momentarily revived

only to be smothered (cue joy) by Caligula, his nephew,
who blew through the Empire’s
surplus, big time.
Parts of this story are certainly untrue, but which ones?

There is a green tree in my yard I think I’d like to kill and pull.
There are sleeping pills.
There is a decorative fountain of ecstatic remorse
rigged to the filling and emptying

of watered-down resolutions.
Trusts, deeds, dresses, gall, gin!
Lewd frogs on bullhorns, disproportionately tiny
royalty checks,

so many pretty things to buy
and the soul’s future earnings
impossible to calculate,
though MJ’s mother’s lawyers keep trying.

If I’m lucky and make it to 77
(neither of my careful parents did),
it’s likely I’ll outlive
my savings and be quite sorry, a guy in the NY Times predicts.

Ontologically speaking, I shouldn’t be okay with that. I light
a scented candle
to keep me company—
Salted Caramel from Henri Bendel, my favorite.

In her highchair
over strained carrots
battle lines were drawn.
Spoons curved clockwise.
No elbow room for south
paw radicals. Assimilation
was the task at hand.

Right wing elders dressed
kindergarten limbs. Long
sleeved, cuffed blouses
muffled rubber band snap-pop.

Between composition lines
a rightward hand guides
tense cursive across

white
space.

Her left foot swings
slightly off the floor.
What had been undone
now an atrophied
remembrance.

When you have walked
your life threadbare.
Mended frayed corners
worn in sun-moonlight.

Brew a balm
on a hearth
of river stones.
Potent enough to rise
necks of roses
wilted on
our pillow spread.

A new moon
bends her head
as you pass over
the river Orontes.

I’ll stand
fearless with sparrows
waiting on your
lonesome hand.

I dreamed of Jersey cows
their root beer colored deco eyes wide as my daughter’s wide as someday

when I explain about the moon and the waves and how a thing can pull another
in unseen directions in an endlessness that rewards human waiting. Even as we sleep.

Our waiting is encouraged by cycles, I point out, on this day. And drastic is best.
We’re made hopeful by the topic of transformation.

I dreamed of yogurt pooled in lava flows of tart at our feet

our heels and ankles anchored as we, sand-bound, wind-swept
re-spent a day at the beach leaning back against changeless charming sky, the sea

reaching forward, receding in mist hisses
audible dissolution of legendary lunar output

until something me broke through pulling something me and
without added effort of courage I woke up.

II. June

Since I can never know what Senta dreams even when she tells me
I will tell you in my own words.

Progress, momentum, and homecoming. And not necessarily in that order.
Watching the time in Seasons. Seeing this body.

When the urge to sort finds me I remind myself how I was born and belong
to transformation. Beyond which there’s only beauty and the sublime

and that big hug that Amma gives out at the convention center

oblivion promise of a falling where
plasma filled void muffles

shutting eyes
closed even against rose petals and jasmine in where

you hear the whole empty chamber of your voice
your sighs, and thoughts as deliberate as arrows.

when I follow you around the corner
and you wander off to a distant corner,
while I’m stuck with Toulouse-Latrec and his Jane Avril
I notice how out of focus she is,
the excess of lines around her that make it look like
he didn’t really know how to draw her that
he didn’t really know how to understand her
and he didn’t even bother drawing her legs which I would assume is
an insult to a can-can dancer at the Moulin Rouge

I notice your legs, your dress
your pulsating silhouette in the gallery
that I know if I tried to trace would collect dust in a box
even if I don’t understand why
even while I’m staring at this painting of spam that’s not supposed to mean anything
even if I know you might not ever be here with me again
even now as you hold my hand
as you stand there,
waiting to be immortalized on canvas
or maybe, just for now, immortalized in my head,
while you nod in approval at Picasso
and photographs of life in the valley.

the tink of glasses falling
into their buckets,
everything spills through,
and I hear you.

This goes to you,

to shaded pavements and kissed limbs
of some far reverie,
beside the naked tree
and nectar of your body.

On nights like this, I could have loved you.

But the breeze is brief
between the immediacy of our memories.
It calls out

late night blues
late night blues

I know
You.

I forget sometimes how
to justify my pride.
I forget sometimes how close I am
retching over the edge I know
my father and I share ghosts.
I want to see the churches burn away
they’d never pray for my father.
No one ever has.
We were born to die in the mire
and sometimes I forget.

Free of sound. Hushed. Subdued. After waves of your hand. Not moving or in
motion. Free from disturbance, agitation, commotion. Free from a noticeable
current: a still pond. Free of you. The room now. A small hymn, then buzz, then
ring. Then nothing but a broken phone. Hello? Of or relating to a single or static
photograph as opposed to a movie. Now, colors like light. Blue. Pink. White.
Silence. Quiet. Adjective, noun, verb. Nevertheless. Notwithstanding. Even so.
Without movement: as when the morning air rouses all objects from their own weight, but you are motionless. Like the blossom pressed down by the chain-linked fence, you are caught here. Still. You are here still.

You could make a case for the pure wildness of,
the pure blackness of your long hair spread
over blue sheets, as you could make a case for
my seed, forgive its murder,
since we were the procreation,
we were the morning of our morning,
for some moments, a little lead into gold.

You could make a case for perfection,
all the hammers turned hypothetical this Sunday,
this Sunday that ruins us,
and the cat, scratching her claws on the duvet,
and the smell of apricot jam simmering
two rooms away, the doors all open,
all the hurry blown out of the house,
all the thrashing long seeped into the earth,
all the love cries still high in the corners of the room.

This is not a poem, not this time,
this is the record of a living invocation,
a pulling down, the recalling of
you who have come before,
the parents and parents, the great-grandparents,
and back and back to the villages,
Hungary, Belarus, the Ukraine,
all the footsteps gathered together,
all of you with your long hair and your beards,
you Jews, you women with delicate eyelashes,
mascara applied by candlelight,
and no one left to see it,
only the pounded silver of the looking glass,
and no tears, not this time,
all of you, carrying the weight,
the pages of your books
torn and shared, copied and performed,
the suitcases of underthings,
just the memory of her after you emigrated and she didn’t,
her work-etched parents gripping her wrists,
her back arched as the ship leaves,
giving you the forever gift of her loss,
and you, in a shanty of a cafe, day’s dust settled,
foreign paper in your hand, dreaming of other worlds

now I am that other world dreaming of you,
calling you forth, all of you,
gathering you like unspooled yarn,
and all the rumors you’ve built your lives on,
or hid from, and what I pull from your pockets,
wool lint, handwritten receipts,
the pebbles collected to mark the day she—
all the particulars of your lives
for you have all been demeaned by
the unfulfilled hope of time,
your hair has become unbraided,
become matted with leaves and mud,
your shoulders sunk, your jaws grown long

and I say in the dark
where none can call me mad—

come with your broken earth and bones,
descend, soak into my pores
you heretofore unknown, so close in time,
you, bent in the fields,
hands heavy with rapeseed and potatoes,
and the sling in which your infant swung,
or you, under the deck, clutching your brother’s head,
as men pry your fingers from his flesh
and lower him into a sea so still
it perfectly reflects the heavens above,
or you two, silent in the searing flames,
the chalk-white bones of your fingers interlocked,
staring where each other’s eyes must be,
and the bodies burn like paper
and you rise on the floating embers,
but never high enough, never to the stars,
and the mourners gather at your side, forever at your side,
all of you without a passage through,
I am ready, gather my living breath,
I will give you my breath,

for someone, someone in this line must dig themselves out,
stand with bare feet, stand with the alders,
break the cake and crust,
for we carry what we’ve been given,
one to the other,
our gathered bodies of ash and dirt,
our generations, and I say,
because no one is listening to call me mad,
for all of you, deaf and unheard,
my pogrom, my heart,
fingers scrapping grout off the wall,
all our shrouds lifting in the wind:
let there be soft rain,
we can call for that,
we can pull our hands up,
gravity is a lie,
we can lift them to a possible heaven,
we know enough now,
are brave enough now,
are together in this roofless temple

and the letters of the Torah float in the air,
and what has been given, is only given.

On the levee    music moves bodies    heat
        I want you to feel    my breasts through thin
shirt’s gauze                        my hips                        riding you like a train
                one more shot of tequila                 sucking
on that lime.                Music won’t let go                 it must be lust
                sheet lightening flashes                 in the distant middle of the night
electricity in the air            no one has a name                 time is the razor
                lifting night’s edge.            Oak trees release summer smell
                        sweat glitters on my belly                lick me
what happens next          I don’t care          I know where we’re headed
                     where we want to go.

Our roads have gone to dust
our factories have sent their workers home
and the bridges have begun to fall outside