Showing posts with label latinx. Show all posts

Saturday, January 8, 2022

Love in a Time of Climate Change

recycling Pablo Neruda's "Sonnet XVII"

I don't love you as if you were rare earth metals,

conflict diamonds, or reserves of crude oil that cause

war. I love you as one loves the most vulnerable

species: urgently, between the habitat and its loss.

I love you as one loves the last seed saved

within a vault, gestating the heritage of our roots,

and thanks to your body, the taste that ripens

from its fruit still lives sweetly on my tongue.

I love you without knowing how or when this world

will end. I love you organically, without pesticides.

I love you like this because we'll only survive

in the nitrogen rich compost of our embrace,

so close that your emissions of carbon are mine,

so close that your sea rises with my heat.

Tuesday, January 4, 2022

DIRTSPEECH

dirtspeech
earthtongue
race be language
before nation

what space
be racer if not
nation maker
where two be one

by race erasure
heartspeak
in translation
of nation chaser

each tongue
be
sacred nature
licked

by liquidy
creation, mere
definition
inteferes

because of its
ubiquity
love
is two lenguas

every lang
uage
should be bi
lingual

Edwin Torres

Tadpole at Starlight

a small infinity

has appeared on the crest of ignition

a curve for all things stolen

a swipe at things that magnify

i was infinite for a moment

traveled inside lightless eye

rode a width across a legion’s pupil

molded by something closer than free

about to crash into a million years

if i could just leave the floating to smaller bugs

my fingers now closed my eyes hovering

over my keys over each letter

my frogs looking to land on soft ground

that’s all we want, isn’t it

a launchpad over stellar indications of messy instability

and maybe a drain to edit

to take the universal

out of in

for all things balanced

on lunar surf

the circumstance of delicate cognition

telegraphs a step — let me go up to you,

now warm in the place i remember, and tired

— do you know how — you ask, your answer…

the one-eyed millipede

say say savi savi sor sor salee saloo sweven sweven swalla swallay see on, say on, to see, to see, to see, on blanking the moment, on silent integral, on obfusement, o words are coming to me, you are making me into o words, I think of you and say o words, as you imagine my grounded smote, as I imagine your wind torn slatch, I am in your o words, was that, where the o poem came from, remember the o poem, I have to find the o poem, the one about the cliffs, about adolescent menagerie, about using arm as limb, thrown to ocean, about inner quest, my early inner quest, I miss my early inner quest, did it leave, never, did it change, always, I miss that, the never leaving, what is it that I miss, that, and in, your o word offering, is where I am falling now, in your o words, offering, is where I drill into sinew, my o word ommorrow, my o marrow, my ongue, my orso, my or, so, in your o word or, is my own, o, my o, in the that, of our mutual offerings, we stayed frozen like that, for hours, on that cliff, though, it felt like seconds, or do minutes feel like seconds when we, move out of the way, o of the way, do we feel like time, when given a chance for movement, do we give our solace its vertigo, when staring into eyes we can’t see, yours, there, in hovered magnitude, mine, there, in softed o pression, of scented imperfections that form this o body, the scented immaterial of my hover, the amount of space I claim, on a ground I call over, to call the ground I claim as the ground I’m over, o word sentient, o word logum, o word rib, o skeletal, osiris, okhemba, ojun, oruba, to inform my landing of promise, to escalate equanimity by using that word, to imply justice, by using that word, to re-train forgiveness, by using that word, to enter matter by matter’s color, to enter marrow by marrow’s color, to ignote color, to in color, to note color into speech, by using that word, o word ontological, I gave you one moment, a lifetime ago, a poem ago, I gave you one word you interpreted as your own, I gave you my word, as your own, you never took, you never gave, we just stayed, cell to cell, eye to eye, intra-spectral atmospheric, it was me that stayed, in that momentary void, it was me that chose, my momentary sunlit apogee, my inner climb, those early days of not, how they formed what I became, how I knew to leave something, when I got too close, how that protection defined my fear, it was me that feared getting too close, how I defined my word, as yours, o word, speculation was a sentient, my body was intact, when we were younger we’d speed through, it was so much to take in, when I was older, we slowed down, it was too much to take in, knowing that standing differently, is what we’ve become

Edwin Torres

from The Begin of Maybe

Maybe sick sick this was
body-had me a time
this body had me
in time I had seen
and I, m is my ism had kept on
I had kept this body at bay
a bad badness I had
I was wicked-sick with had
when will sick-wicked-with have me

Monday, January 3, 2022

Edwin Torres

Post Isolation

—for Ian Curtis

if everyone leaves me tomorrow
if everyone leaves me today will everyone know me tomorrow
did everyone know me today

this morning my walk in my shadow
last night my surrender my screen tomorrow my water so hollow
I’m telling you things you don’t need

in isolation / every sensation / gets elevation / in isolation

if gratitude is a contagion
a sign of the catchable rise a question of human erosion
a quiver inside a demise

to see the eclipsed intervention
what severs the server we see to enter the size we embody
to follow the follow we feed

in isolation / I found a nation / in hibernation / I found creation

if bodies are made of existence
we’re doing the best that we can if language is made of resistance
to offer a hand for a hand

to learn what we can from our body
to honor the teachable plan to enter the question of body
to answer the best that we can

Esteban Rodriguez

Cats

CATS

Belly blacker than asphalt, than fresh tire marks and the silhouette of mesquite against a filmstrip sky, I squat down as if to pay tribute, an amateur in animal deaths, in stray cats I feed dinner-scraps against my mother’s will. These are the driveway scavengers, solicitors of sympathy rubbing against my leg, and this one is the dead one that veered off its map, tested traffic, briefly became brave. I study the lump of feral bone and flesh, how the miscellany of its stomach spreads out like scree, red, rotten, rumpled like morning bed sheets, and there is a sense that if I believe in fate, this is the only end the cat could have endured, that my being here is a kind of funeral, and my silence a roadside elegy for all the lives this stretch of road has ever killed. I feel I should toss it back in the yard, prepare a more human ritual, but my hands are too young to dig a proper burial, work through dusk and watch the suburban moon rise into our country air, as it becomes a witness to the after-act of death again, and I scrape my shovel beneath its head instead, dump it in a nearby bush, turn back home with the hum of 281 singing in my ears.

Ruben Quesada

Three poems from Next Extinct Mammal:

My First Sight of St. Louis

Hyperbolic cosine, a sickle rising
up against the Mississippi River,
its widening reflection exposes pods
of fiery clouds: dolphins sinking past
the alpenglow of tomorrow and tomorrow.
An overflow of arable plains, turbid skies,
backwash of homes, ebbing sea grass
meadows of river birch rising en masse;
tangerine leaves among stained-glass
throngs of silver leaves in waves, winged-bean
green epiphany of skyline behind polished steel.

Cimmerian

From my bedroom window, driving
through town, everywhere I sit,
the blue like Picasso’s player
swells overhead, blue behind strings
of clouds which lengthen
like loose ligaments into the horizon.
Every day,
you should breathe in deeply
for the fireflies and the crickets; watch
the constellations of moths choke
on the glowing street lamps and the yawning
cockroaches before the sun flushes away.

Nostalgia

Too much time has passed,
and I’ve almost lost this freight
of memories, that dawning
of light over bluestem grass
prairies, the large-flowered
beardtongue and skeleton weed, or failed
to preserve the slow sea-roar
in my lungs expanding against my breast
bone, my nose numbing from the cold, my lashes
freezing in clusters of snowflakes. Here,
alone on the westbound train
in Des Moines, rescued from the wind
chill of the Raccoon River, homes rise
like icebergs along East Locust Street, the patina
of my black hair moving past snow
flurried storefronts might be mistaken
for the next extinct mammal in America.

Ruben Quesada

On Witness

For Paul Monette

Dear Stranger,

Remind me of a time when love tucked us back into the earth without care; where and when
daily we awoke to discover friendly faces gone, silent bodies drawn at dawn. Look out. See the
flattened clouds fill the horizon; it is a gray so slick you can see your smile reflected in winter’s
glen; you’ve become the sky, your face filling the heavens. All that is left is the faint smell of
lavender lingering like a bruise. I refuse to lose you.

Oliver Baez Bendorf

Will and Testament

I want to be buried under timber and rock
like Caeneus was. I’ll be immune to weapons,
even once they find original female, soft
in the wrong places, scarred. Leave me in
a woods somewhere quiet, let my ribs
rattle with the woodpecker’s industry.
Let the heavens fade lilac to orange on
the longest night. I’ll leave you candles.
May raccoons walk their spidery prints all
over the dirt, may berries sprout
magic. I leave you my pleasure and joy
for which I worked so hard. I wish you
lusty longing and rapt attention. Though
the twiggy lean-to off the trail is not my
property to transfer, I hope you find it.
I offer you my bright dumb
hopes for democracy. May your vote always
be counted. Your body was made
to shift shape. Seek to serve. Come visit me where
pines loop, tell me joy you’re having. Tangible form. Isn’t it amazing
the golden needles dropped,
how they leave a pad
on the ground
for your tent? Grove
awaits. Already
abandoned

my body once— look what happened after.

Esteban Rodriguez

THREE POEMS

1 EL GALLO

And when you got to high school,
you stopped giving them names,
no longer saw the chickens as Luz,
Maribel, Elena, Guadalupe, didn’t try
to justify their open mouths for smiles,
their clucks for joy, their wing flapping
for how excited they were to see you again.
No, in fact you regretted that you ever
loved them in the first place, that at night
you would sneak one in, tuck her next to you
in bed, and in the morning, when no one
was looking, fed her pieces of your breakfast
from your hand, like she was a pet,
though you knew that she was anything but,
that sometimes, for reasons you didn’t yet
understand, your father would go out
into the yard, and like a man surveying
what he knows can no longer live,
would grab one of your beloved chickens,
wring her neck, and with her limp body
in his hands, take her to a place beyond
the yard, where you prayed he’d pick
a spot you could easily find, walk to
when you felt alone, and reminisce.

EL DIABLITO

When you imagine your father
in the desert, you also imagine the devil,
not the horned, goat-legged,
or personified snake version,
but the one that manifests as a small
shadowy figure, a trickster that follows
your father, places, when he’s not looking,
rocks he stumbles over, or kilometers
of cactuses he must trudge through,
only to find, when he reaches the end,
mirages that make him believe
he is seeing cities, oil refineries,
floating islands that he can climb up
and rest on, forget how the devil pinches
his skin, or squeezes his throat,
or carves a fever across the back
of his neck, and how at night,
when your father thinks the stars
will ease the desert’s uncertainty,
bangs on a drum just off in the distance,
as if to remind him that no matter
what corner of the earth he finds himself in,
his fate offers no moment of rest.

LA BOTA

At home, there was nothing your father
couldn’t turn his work boots into—
a hammer for loose nails, a prop to even
stubborn tables and chairs, a weapon
to end the lives of anonymous insects.
And there were nights when he would sleepwalk,
and out in the yard with nothing but underwear
on, he’d smack together the bottoms of his boots,
as if there were spirits he had to ward off,
as if his past had taken on some once human form,
and to remind him that no one is ever free
of sin, made it its duty to stalk him at home.
And though it lasted no more than a few minutes,
and your mother would wake him up,
bring him back in, you figured that the boots
had done their job, that the reason he never used
sticks, pots or pans, or yelled at the top
of his lungs was because he wanted the spirit
to know exactly who he was,
that he had every right to be at peace
on whatever ground he walked.

Ruben Quesada

For Charlie

as the early morning light reflected off leaves against my window I called you to say I was moving back and I cried so deeply the way I cried for weeks after I moved losing my breath hovering between waking and sleep on the day I left I stood on your balcony facing the Pacific Ocean watching the sea stretch past a gauze of power lines into a green horizon this summer I began to awaken with my body covered in a cold sweat a whippoorwill calling from beyond the ramshackle fence kept me calm through the darkness and earlier this spring my dear friend Charlie had mysteriously died and like so many secrets we shared he loved to tan turning a tone the color of a young Toni Tennille he loved to dance he loved to pray every night I lie and recite the Act of Contrition to settle my head I am sorry for my sins with all my heart in choosing to do wrong and failing to do good I have sinned against you whom I should love above all things and almost every night I’ve dreamt of Charlie reading by candlelight he is old his skin sags like the arms of a tulip tree how easy it is to listen to his voice I cradle my chin into his neck our beards brush together now as you answer the phone I hear the discordant steam of cargo ships murmur in the distance there is no reason to lie to you I have been dying since we met

Oliver Baez Bendorf

WILL AND TESTAMENT

Oliver Baez Bendorf

Queer Facts About Vegetables

In 1893, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that the tomato is

a vegetable (for taxation purposes), even though botanically it fit the definition of a fruit.

I know I am a nightshade,
it says to its own limp vine.
I know how to burst

against teeth
with my juice and seed.
I'm as small

as a thumbnail, no,
I'm as big as the harvest
fucking sun.

I'm fresh blood
on a small curled fist.
I can be a boy, I know,

but never a man.
I can be Sunday gravy
or a pickled green.

This is still the tomato
talking to the vine,
as told to me.

Oliver Baez Bendorf

Field Guide to the Spectral Wilderness

When you arrive, it must be morning. The light must blue over triangles of treeline. There must be fields of corn and there must be coroners mistaking elbow joints for knee bones. There must be a trail through the woods at Possum Hollow and there must be the skull of a possum still lodged inside the trunk of a tree. There must be a tree. There must be the slightest hint of danger. There must be corners neatly tucked. There must be red the color of a puppy’s tongue there must be pleasure whether strapped or stolen and there must be ice there must always always always always be ice. There must be a way to feel our way toward the water and light from this darkness. There must be a fire. There must be a little candle thing that makes the bells go round. There must be a girl, there has always been a girl. There must be a boy, there has always been a boy. There must be a sharps container. There has never been a man but there must now be a man, not because one is needed but because one isn’t. There must be a ghost. They must be hungry. There must be a tiny meal and then there must be the best kind of love. There must be pine needles. There must be papercuts. A punchline. A burial. There must be a way to fall asleep beside the dead coyote and not wake up wearing its fur. There must be a horseman. There must be someone around here who remembers the voice of the girl. It isn’t me but it must be me. There must be daylight. There must be a yellow house. There must be a window. A ladder. A compass. We must have new names. There must be a boy and a girl and we must have new names. There must be a boy and there must be a girl. There must be. There must be. There must be someone looking for us by now. They must wonder where we are.

Oliver Baez Bendorf

T4T

BY OLIVER BAEZ BENDORF

And I think he must be drunk, from the sweet way he.

Brother. I think about his XX all the time. It’s like a joke,

that we’ll start dreaming of men once we. My favorite

version is the one where we. We ate citrus on river rock

while others swam out. Stern lady cop found us out-of-

towners naked, our clothes scattered around pine root.

Dampened for days. But he. Inclination surges

through window screen—that wind, you’d think

we’d found ourselves in beach town.

If I had the chance, I’d go right to the root of him.

Shouldn’t I out of anyone feel it with my main medium.

I think there’s something happy and right about us mating.

That night how you. Chest flying. Tonight my house creaks.

Somewhere swings open a gate we all know we all want.

Edwin Torres

Three Poems

The Interrupted Blanket

the effort to remain ambiguous
while your heart is beating
—broken heart as shadowplay

I stand on the calculated cliff
inner rinsing against telestration
—adhesion of a sun cloud

jagged reminders
trying to look past deeply torn tensions
—just say it, are you fitting in or not

say oh, and make a good void
oh —how did that feel
what creates your properly responsive emptiness

where does my blinking mechanism
ride me, did you know
—bees sleep in flowers holding each other’s feet

and the unsleeping puzzle
—dreams
of its missing piece

the world outside these walls
is intent
—on making me face it

am I to give in, or is that giving in
one kind of freedom
—looking to fit in

What Dark Is When Stepped On

I want to give you one bulb for each one buried
Each one of your fingers
You have one filament, one wattage, one fuse
For pores to acknowledge receptivity

I want to give you one life for each one passed
Each one switched—can I be the one who stops for you
Can I be one sorrow, one bliss, one repeated assemblage of loss
To acknowledge availability

I want to give you one breath for each dark—stop, would you
Each one centered—stop here, in the pattern
For one day, one walk, one melted intelligence
To take the heart away—stop here

To be the one who stops—curious with darkness
One borrow, one blame, one burn
Each one lit, maybe, one take
My weight at each step

To hold you, one moment, for every one missed
Can I be that—each one telling, what each one says
You have one unknown, one interior reflection
For countless imperfections to arrive

I want to wordlessly exchange each darkness
Each one softed upon
You have one neck, one mouth, one touch
To tell me so

It Was Nectar You Heard in the Shadows

bee whisperers     save the swarm
and tell me when a poem     is being written
somewhere I can’t see somewhere
far from me
a poem is being written     conceived
reborn out of the hive
somewhere a resurrection
is capturing the ear of a bee whisperer
riding the wind     of a thousand hums
in every stanza     I’ve never heard
is the new poem     I’ll never see
but be
up there in the air I can
just about smell if I    just about
tilt my scent to paint gender out of direction
how fluidity
defines a species     out of its time
to sliver a murmur     a group in midflight
to part clouds     with susurration
says cloud, well    what do you mean by that

Tuesday, December 28, 2021

Felix Gonzalez-Torres

Untitled (Alice B. Toklas and Gertrude Stein's grave)

, 1992

color coupler print mounted on board

Felix Gonzalez-Torres

Untitled (Portrait of Marcel Brient)

, 1992

candies, individually wrapped in light-blue cellophane (endless supply)

Sunday, December 12, 2021

Edwin Torres

A Most Imperfect Start

Forever the mighty maze inflicts unchangement
a sly wander from the course unchosen.
If once this could have been what reflected continue
what exposed go, what gave most high staring
its relentless give, which all we wish, was a stay of let.
If once this breath-bomb staggered
to show its true stance; then we, collected breathlessly
by time's stammer, would have found reason for change.

The sportsman aligns himself under the object of his catch
his muscles remember the most accurate procedure
The sportsman has a child, a home, a wife he loves but not for long,
a drug addiction behind him, a relapse before him, a diamond ring
waiting to be picked up with the initials of his favorite pet
cast in gold across a wealth of gems. He puts all this
out of his mind, his brain blocks this information as it has been
trained to do when his body reacts to the object, 100 feet in the air.

The object was once a cow hit by a tree unspun by machinery,
a breeze through its branches before twine once decided its future.
The tree meets the diamond ring, the breeze unlocked in the sun
meets the house, the wife catches the object, the child runs the field,
the drugs find the twine, the college scholarship makes contact
with the forest, the sportsman uncaught remains staggered
under the object of his catch.

One day a worm approached a caterpillar, lost on the ground
beneath his tree. That conversation became a butterfly
born of misguided hierarchy. There once was a rainstorm of
repetition showering the trees with apprehension. That raindrop
became an ocean for a country of smaller oceans. Once upon
a time there fell an enormous child who tried to brace himself
on whatever he could catch, he would throw something and
lean against it before it would land.

We each have our function-machines set for body salvation
or emotion-bearers, each of us, in what is laid
for most imperfect starts, most unpounceable hearts.
We are each in the guise of body when least aware of body.
I am continually at wander with the reach of everyone around me.
This motion will cut most unexpected matters
and when most unexpected, what survives will be laid bare.