Sample Poems
“As a poet-teacher I feel it’s my responsibility, among many other responsibilities, to help students become lifelong readers of poetry.”
Deed
This land
Say rez
This land
Say barrio
This land
Say township
This land
Say favela
This land
Say camp
This land
Say underpass
This land
Say colony
This land
Say ghetto
This land
Was made
For you–
Para ti, hijo
Unearthed
Colorín colorado, este cuento se ha acabado.
—popular Spanish phrase at the end of stories
What to call a story that’s never done?
Cuento sin fin, engraved, unremitting rhyme.
Dust-to-dust toil, never finished, just begun.
In unceasing cycles of season and sun,
Thick debts batter too-thin dimes.
What to call a story that’s never done?
A fable with no moral, authored by no one,
Migration in dust-jacketed dreamtime,
Dust-to-dust toil, never finished, just begun.
Cuenta el cuento, hijo—tell it with conviction,
Rip cheap fictions. Erase hate-hatched signs.
What shall we call this story that’s never done?
Go home, they’ll tell you, thinking you’ll run.
Empieza por ti: rewrite the plotless storyline.
Dust-to-dust toil, never finished, just begun.
I wish you a life of unsoiled work, my son,
Far from clipped angels and their earthly crime.
What should we call this story that’s never done?
Dust-to-dust toil, never finished, just begun.
Excerpted from Cuent@, chapbook published by Finishing Line Press (2016)
The I in Dos
At my birth there was a great gushing,
A brown river swollen by the riving,
A scream that split Before from
After—Them from Us.
Empieza por ti, she says. Empieza.
So I start.
I am the shame and the need
Of imported arms, bracero.
I am the dry well and the spume
Of their lasciviousness, mujer.
I am the meager meal
And the fattened pride, niño.
I am the supporting beam
And the angry graffito
Of liberty’s flat façade,
The silt and the pearl
In history’s unruly sea.
Empieza por ti, she said.
Excerpted from Cuent@, chapbook published by Finishing Line Press (2016)
Toll
Listen to the tinkling
of the paletero’s simple bells—
they rattle a religion deep
inside you—escúchalas
con todo tu corazón—
their song reaches heaven
long before the clang
of ponderous cathedral bronze.
Printer’s Devil
It’s one or the other, says the owner
of American Printing. I can’t hire both.
But your ad said two, Tío reminds him.
Tío Genaro is a prize-winning pressman; my father
the best in Print Shop at Lanier High. It’s 1945—
war is over and there’s a bright gleam in these young
brown men’s eyes—you can see it, the starburst
of possibility that swirls in them. But the owner
tells my uncle—the elder, the fixer—just one ‘Pedro’;
I don’t want no trouble. As if together, my uncle, my father,
and every Chicano like them, might spill blood,
not ink. Might print feisty manifestos, instead
of hospital invoices. Might give new meaning
to “die-cut.” It is 1945 and radical acts are few
in San Antonio. Thank you, sir. My brother and I
will look elsewhere. Tío says this even though elsewhere
is not much better in that oddly peaceful year.
Translation
Heading west on Guadalupe Street
in my Dad’s ’56 Chevy Bel-Air,
we are mystically transfigured, block
by block: at North Trinity, Dad becomes
Papá; Mom, Mamá. We squiggly kids are niños.
Accent marks pop up at every corner, wands
that poke at the soft, doughy words
rising like warm Sunday biscuits.
We cross Zarzamora, where the Texas sun
transforms asphalt into a ribbon
of bumpy, squishy blackberry. The flowers
that fill my sister’s lace-dressed lap
evolve, as if a new season of names
just blew in: velvety cockscomb
is mano de león—rooster to lion—
and the sunset flounces of marigolds
ruffle into cempasúchiles. As we near
the cemetery, el panteón, Mamá says the dead—
abuelas, abuelos, tías, tíos—are waiting
to receive la visita. She tells us this in words
that sing del allá, words that speak nuestro acá.
“Toll,” “Printer’s Devil” and “Translation” excerpted from Brazos, Carry Me, published by Kórima Press (2013)
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