Poetry Thursday - for Tim and my mom and their promesa

When I Became La Promesa
~Peggy Robles–Alvarado

For every unexpected illness that required medical insurance,
every second-trimester miscarriage, every chaos unemployment
caused, every looming eviction, every arrest warrant gone
unanswered, the women in my family made promesas to plaster
cast statues worshipped in overcrowded apartments with rum
poured over linoleum, nine-day candles coughing black soot
until the wick surrendered, Florida water perfuming doorways
and the backs of necks.

Promesas: barters/contracts with a God they didn’t vow to
change for but always appeased/ bowls of fruit/ paper bags filled
with coconut candy and caserolas de ajiaco/ left at busy intersections,
an oak tree in High bridge park, the doorway of the 34th precinct,
and when mar pacifico and rompe saraguey refused to grow on
Washington Heights windowsills, the youngest became part of
the trade.

Unsullied and unaware: cousin Mari pissed about having to dress
in green and red for twenty-one days to keep Tío Pablo out of jail/
Luisito scratching at an anklet made of braided corn silk to help
Tía Lorna find a new job/ and my hair not to be cut until Papi’s
tumor was removed.

Gathered in tight buns or sectioned pigtails, falling long past my
waist when asymmetrical bobs were in fashion, unaware my crown
had the necessary coercion to dislodge a mass from a colon, I grabbed
my older brother’s clippers, ran thirsty blades across my right temple
to the back of my ear, massaged the softness that emerged as strands
surrendered on bathroom tiles. My desire to mimic freestyle icons,
whose albums my cousins and I scratched on old record players,
wagered against Papi’s large intestine.

My unsteady hand: a fist
in the face of God.

Copyright © 2020 by Peggy Robles–Alvarado. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on October 6, 2020, by the Academy of American Poets.

Not Poetry Thursday, Mary Oliver's Wild Geese - because we all need this reminder

Wild Geese
~Mary Oliver

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting -
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

I have been moved to tears over the simplest things for the past few weeks - and it is mostly because I am carrying so much for myself and others right now. Not to say that they tears were not appropriate ... but I haven't been allowing myself to feel my own pain, so it spills out when I see that of others.

I do not have to be good or walk on my knees -- or hold in my pain. 

Neither do you.

Wishing you space to feel all the feelings in safety.

Poetry Thursday, Self care and boundaries are hard...

Time-Lapse Video of Trans Woman Collapsing Inward Like a Dying Star
~Joshua Jennifer Espinoza

I beg for invisible fire.

Every night I pray to love,
please invent yourself.

I imagine a place after this place
and I laugh quietly to no one
as the hair on my chin
weeds through old makeup.

When I go to sleep
I am vinegar inside clouded glass.
The world comes to an end
when I wake up and wonder
who will be next to me.

Police sirens and coyote howls
blend together in morning’s net.
Once, I walked out past the cars
and stood on a natural rock formation
that seemed placed there to be stood on.
I felt something like kinship.
It was the first time.

Once, I believed god
was a blanket of energy
stretched out around
our most vulnerable
places,

when really,

she’s the sound
of a promise
breaking

Copyright © 2020 by Joshua Jennifer Espinoza. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on October 14, 2020, by the Academy of American Poets.

“Many of my poems involve figures who are desperately attempting to invent a means of survival under conditions that seem determined to prevent them from surviving. This poem is concerned with what happens when performing the daily magic of saving oneself becomes too tiring, so that the only remaining option is to scream out the pain, loneliness, and desperation, and allow the collapse to happen. This is a cry for help, one that enacts, through its own existence, proof of self-love and a desire to keep living, despite everything.”

—Joshua Jennifer Espinoza

Poetry Thursday, Hispanic Heritage Month

Legend
~Helena Mesa

During the war, women hid messages
   inside white flowers
tucked in their hair. They crossed
   enemy lines, slipped the blossoms
into soldiers’ fists. What might
   have been a child’s crown
for her communion, an offering
   at a grave, might win the war.
The ovule, the style, the stigma—
   what seemed to unfurl overnight
took weeks, even years.
   Dream your hand plucks the bloom,
its widest petals like porcelain,
   and a halo of bees skims your arms.
Upon waking, walk to the docks,
   the bloom heavy behind your ear,
and breathe in its sweet persistence,
   its scent of sea salt and gutted fish.

Copyright © 2019 by Helena Mesa. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on December 9, 2019, by the Academy of American Poets.

We need more poetry - and I have been AWOL, not Poetry Thursday, Hispanic Heritage Month edition

 Nó, Actually, Soy Salvadoreño
~Javier Zamora

“EL Sal-va-doh-RE-AN Salva-doh-RAN, Salva-DOH-RÍ-an,”
los mui-muis, we don’t even know what
to call ourselves. How to eat
a pupusa: ¿fork & knife? or
¿open it up & treat it like a taco? but
then, we’re betraying our nationalistic (read:
anti-black, anti-indigenous) impulse
to not mix with anyone else. ¿& what’s
with jalapeños in the curtido,
cipotes? ¿With using spicy “salsa”
instead of salsa de tomate? There’s too many
“restaurantes,” one side of the menu: Mexican,
the other, platos típicos. Typically
I want to order the ensalada, but then
they bring me an actual salad.
I say: cóman miercoles, they
want to charge me extra for harina de arroz. Extra
por los nueagados. There’s
nowhere I’d rather be most
than in Abuelita’s kitchen, watching her
throw bay leaves, tomatoes, garlic, orégano
into the blender, then chicharrón,
helping her sell to everyone that knows
she made the best pupusas
from 1985 to 2004. By then,
Salvadoreños became “Hermanos Lejanos,”
we traded Colón for Washingtón. By then,
Los Hermanos Flores looked for new singers
every time they returned from Los Yunaited
to San Salvador. Stay, no se vayan,
es-tei, no sean dundos, was all
those Salvadoreños could say.
We didn’t listen & came here
only to be called Mexican or Puerto Rican,
depending on the coast. We had to fight
for our better horchata, not
the lazy whiter one with only rice. & when
we didn’t want to fight
we tried to blend, speak more “Mexican,”
more ira, more popote, more
no pos guao. ¡Nó, majes!
¡No se me hagan dundos,
ponganse trucha vos!
When anyone wants to call you: Mexican.
You can just say: Nó,
actually, andáte a la M—
racista cara de nacionalista.

Copyright © 2020 by Javier Zamora. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on October 9, 2020 by the Academy of American Poets.

Poetry Thursday, Hispanic Heritage Month, on borders and maps and geography...

Maps
 ~Yesenia Montilla
For Marcelo

Some maps have blue borders
like the blue of your name
or the tributary lacing of
veins running through your
father’s hands. & how the last
time I saw you, you held
me for so long I saw whole
lifetimes flooding by me
small tentacles reaching
for both our faces. I wish
maps would be without
borders & that we belonged
to no one & to everyone
at once, what a world that
would be. Or not a world
maybe we would call it
something more intrinsic
like forgiving or something
simplistic like river or dirt.
& if I were to see you
tomorrow & everyone you
came from had disappeared
I would weep with you & drown
out any black lines that this
earth allowed us to give it—
because what is a map but
a useless prison? We are all
so lost & no naming of blank
spaces can save us. & what
is a map but the delusion of
safety? The line drawn is always
in the sand & folds on itself
before we’re done making it.
& that line, there, south of
el rio, how it dares to cover
up the bodies, as though we
would forget who died there
& for what? As if we could
forget that if you spin a globe
& stop it with your finger
you’ll land it on top of someone
living, someone who was not
expecting to be crushed by thirst—

Copyright © 2017 Yesenia Montilla. Used with permission of the author.

Poetry Thursday, Hispanic Heritage Month

This Moment / Right Now
 ~Roberto Carlos Garcia
                                 for Monica Hand

there’s a whispered prayer blowing
the crumbs of a season’s harvest
                 off a girl’s plate

& a roar breaks from her insides,
the roar a lioness
                 a beast that knows

& a man kneels somewhere
cupping his tears
                 for the loneliness he feels

though he’s surrounded by the world,
& a finch in a tree singing
                 for a lover as the buds on its branch

pop into leaves that will flourish
& welcome the green grasses,
                 Right now    a boy is wondering

if people can really dodge bullets
& is he one of them & somewhere nobody bothers
                 to ask, they simply wait

Wind spins across the landscape
they say God is twirling his fingers—

The heartbroken hook new bodies,
night after night, drink after drink

& I dance—my feet mashing grapes
for wine & I sing mockingly—
                 what is life / what is life

Copyright © 2017 Roberto Carlos Garcia. Used with permission of the author.