My mother is 21,
conjuring María Félix, smolder
kohl eye.
She is the sound of freeways at rush hour
crashing hips. Hourglassed—an ache.
She wears a beehive of unanswered questions:
Curios, feathers, silences, heart songs, grafted tongue.
Tangerine mouth, pouting
lips. She is engaged to Rubén González.
She is cleaning houses.
She is walking home
late with the moon.
It’s the sound you hear
when you turn off your TV.
It’s the sound that old men make at night
as they’re sleeping on the sidewalk,
outside an empty loft building.
It’s the sound of air escaping your mouth
after you get the notice
that the rent is increasing.
It’s that same sound you heard
when you tore up that ticket
for jaywalking.
They still built the wall. Even though we marched downtown,
jackets and ties peering down from high rises as we shouted,
¡Muro, no. Pueblo sí! After we shut down Paisano, horns
pressed, sage smoke rising, matachines barefoot and rattling.
After we sipped sangre de Cristo through chain links year
after year on Día de los Muertos. After our mayors declared,
¡Ya basta! San Diego to Brownsville. After amas pushed
strollers from Douglas to San Elizario. After comadres
from Mujer Obrera, striking hungry, cuffed themselves to
the Whitehouse gates and chanted, ¡Obama, escucha, estamos
en la lucha! After Red Fronteriza. Hands across the Border.
Continue reading
First Christmas back from college and El Paso is a stark and lonely place. My dad’s asleep in his easy chair. Mom’s got the caldo de pollo simmering on the stove for me. But something else simmers in my private heart. This want deeper than carnal grinds me down. This unquiet urge slowly reams me out.
I’m locked in my room, poring through my high school yearbook, studying the florid signatures of all my pretty classmates beseeching me to call whenever I’m in town. Hearts for punctuation. Smiley faces dotting the i’s. 2 Sweet 2 B 4 Got 10… What can they possibly mean except U R 4 Got 10 already?
Dad knocks on the door and asks if I’m okay. I tell him I’m going to see a friend. But it’s late, he says. Not late for me. It’s 10:30, he says. That’s early, I tell him. When they’re in bed, I take the keys and go.
The roads are quiet. The sky is overcast. Bing Crosby on the radio wants to make me cry. I follow the city lodestar, there on the Franklin Mountains, the giant five-pointed pentagram of bright electric bulbs that light up every Christmas. I pull into a bar to drink but it’s strange sitting by myself with all these older blinder boozers who can hardly finish a sentence, so I leave. I almost hit another bar but the lone drunk with his pecker out is pissing the word “NO” on the wall outside. I don’t want a drink. I don’t need a drink. I need a girl, some girl to lie to, hold, feel against me, someone to give me a little nighttime CPR, for god’s sake. Just one time. One night. That’s all.
Huizache #6 has arrived! Our newest issue is great reading, and with the beautiful cover art by legendary Chicano artist John Valdez, you’ll look great reading it! Huizache #6 offers prose from El Paso’s Christine Granados, Denver’s Sheryl Luna, Oakland’s Aida Salazar; from award-winning playwright Octavio Solis, filmmaker/author Jesús Salvador Treviño, and New Orleans’s Bryan Washington. Poets in h6 include California’s Lisa Alvarez, Texas’s Abigail Carl-Klassen, Mexico’s Christina Rivera Garza, New York’s Paco Marquez, Michigan’s Rachel Nelson and New Mexico’s Joaquin Zihuatanejo. And if that’s not enough, we’ve put linocuts by LA printmaker Daniel González throughout the issue. Check out the full contents, or better yet…just buy it right now.
Of the eleven sailors that drowned saving the civilian vessel Louisa Marcondes from sinking into the roaring soup of the Pacific, five were destined to keep returning, crossing paths in different lives.
In a linear timeline, the first incarnation fated them to be remembered as the Green Children of Curlywee, later interpreted as a Scottish folk tale about three boys and two girls with a green skin tone who appeared delirious and grief-stricken, all of them shivering, muddy, and holding hands, making throaty sounds like grinding glass to communicate. Upon being separated and forcibly educated, they each swelled with depression. Two suicided in morbid ways using tools or utensils, and the other three (it was always said like this) simply lay down and died.
In the next life they were all born girls to peasant teenagers out of wedlock. Continue reading
Abuelita’s mother died when she was one.
No one talks about Tatarabuela
or about how Abuelita draws her eyebrows on at dawn.
I saw them once
when I pretended to snore.
Abuelita’s name should be Rocío
because she wakes at 5 to water plants.
My aunts say her name means truth
in some language no one speaks.
Abuelo says Abuelita burned the beans
otra vez. Chepito the Fourth dreams of tortillas
when Abuelo swings on the hammock. Abuelita,
¿pero why you don’t have eyebrows?
Sometimes Abuelita dries her bras on rose bushes.
Doña Ávalos thinks she grows the best roses,
so when they walk to the market
their baskets bounce on opposite sides.
Abuelo cuts our parakeets’ wings and teaches them to speak.
I forgot to feed Chepito the Third for a week.
I said the cat ate Chepito the Second
and when he became dough below my feet
I buried the first Chepito.
Abuelo dips our moons in vodka. Truth is,
before I drowned Chepito the Fourth, I asked him
if he remembered the eggshell
he broke. Abuelita, ¿will you forget
the veins on the back of Abuelo’s hands?
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Javier Zamora was born in La Herradura, El Salvador. At the age of nine he migrated to the United States. Zamora received a Bread Loaf scholarship and a fellowships from CantoMundo, Colgate University, and the National Endowment for the Arts. His poems appear or are forthcoming in Narrative, Ploughshares, Poetry, The Kenyon Review, and elsewhere.
Tim Seibles, a contributor to the debut issue of Huizache, has just been named Poet Laureate of Virginia by Governor Terry McAullife (whose name you might recognize as one of the Clintons’ biggest political partners, but that is another story). We are proud to have shown off his work and prouder still to see his career doing so well!
The official announcement from the Governor’s office is pretty cool (you can also find out who was named to the Virginia Biotechnology Research Park Authority!). More info comes from the press release from Old Dominion, where Tim Seibles teaches (and from whom I stole the picture of Tim). And you can check out Tim’s page at The American Academy of Poets to learn more about his work.
In my twenty-seven years in this country, I’ve met every sitting President, with the sorry exception of Mr. Obama. They didn’t always meet me, but I met them.
“Can I take the plate now, Mr. Bush?”
“More water, Mr. Clinton?”
Depending on the shift, I was a food runner or busboy, sometimes both. I tried to address each man by name, to feel those powerful syllables crackle in my mouth. Clin-ton. Ray-gun. I tried to act natural, though always with perfect respect. Continue reading
The good folks over at latinopia.com have just posted a video of me talking about Mexican American Literature: A Portable Anthology, an awesome new book I co-edited with Huizache EIC Dagoberto Gilb.
If you don’t know Latinopia, you’ve been missing out. Latinopia is an incredible online resource, full of video interviews, profiles, readings, recipes, music, blogs and all sorts other things Chicano and Latino, with more stuff getting added all the time. The site owes its existence to the tremendous effort and talents of producer Jesus Treviño. Jesus has been gathering materials for pretty much forever, so the site has decades of images and videos that you would never find if not for the site. One of my favorites is a video of José Montoya reading his legendary poem “El Louie” about a pachuco who, just like me and Jesus, is from ol’ EPT.