Arnoldo García

This neighborhood dies of thirst

Our revolution

has no martyrs

we have no revolution

yet we have martyrs

young men and boys

who kill each other

because we have no revolution

except the violence of one for them

The border brothers

make north and south

the north is nothing without the south

the south cannot exist without the north

yet young men and boys

kill each other

for lack of direction

the border brothers are both

north and south

north is a border

south of the border

north borders south

they are lost in their vengeance

"War is the extension of politics by other means"

Gang war

is a figment

of the imagination

of boys and young men

with guns

what politics

are they extending

except naked power

over their neighbors

over their families

in the ruins of an imaginary war

with real bullets

with real victims

destroyed families

Thirteen years old

fourteen

fifteen

sixteen

seventeen

they'll be forgotten

only to be remembered by their mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters

who have a crushed sun in their throat

East Oakland is a ghost, a crying woman, a gutted kid, foreclosed futures

altars on 55th, 40th, MacArthur, Foothill

Our future disappears in drive-bys and shootouts

we have a name and a history

we are not to die before our time

we walk the graveyard that the guns propose in our neighborhoods

When I go to work in the mornings

I see students walking to school

I look for colors

red blue black & white signals

spray-can scribes

marking the neighborhood as theirs

and everyone else beware

but the cops have more guns, radios, courts, judges, jails

more men armed and dangerous

patrolling the streets

where will the children go

to jail to school to work to post?

How will this story end?

My neighbors go to work early

come back late

the children are left alone and become old by nightfall

we bury them at dawn

and make it to work by 9?

east oakland lies in the middle of the borders north & south

surrounded by crosses, guns, cops, day laborers, norteños, sureños and gentrifiers

with their banks and police force

how will this story begin?