My blindness, my body

arnoldo garcía

My blindness
Has not
Slowed me down.

I take my time
Looking at you
Memorizing the times I made you laugh
To blur over the other times I made you cry
The curvatures
Of your face
Wrinkles
That are rivulets of life

I am a master at science fiction
I can portray myself
As defying time and space
Gravity has no pull
I am a natural human combustion
From the loins of a woman called
Guadalupe.

I am going deaf
Now only a B natural note
Whirs in my neurons
Bouncing around
An insatiable insect
The hum of electricity in my body
A note in the unending chain of the music of DNA

My blindness
Has not blinded me
to your termporal beauty
My deafness roars
With symphonies and corridos
My body
A grand canyon
A tempest
A purépecha temple
Overgrown with rainforest and serpent clouds
And other ancestral lusts

I have no other place to struggle
Than from this homeland this mother earth body of mine
You don’t lose your senses
For each one that fails
A new one is born in resistance in struggle
I have a body surrounding me
For each one of my senses
A hearing body
A feeling body
A smelling body
A touching body
A seeing body
A body of ears
A body of skin, pores, molecules that sponge up your skin
A body of noses for your sweet
human smell,
work sweat,
laughter sweat,
sex sweat,
the smell of freshly slightly tinged
burnt tortillas
Chiles verdes, tomates,
your freshly bathed body,
your shadow a cool face for the farmworker in me
A body
made of hands
that trace worlds and other senses
over your body
over the dust
through the wind,
that  cover my eyes from the sunlight,
that cover my mouth when I gasp at you
under my hands
a body of sign languages and gang signals for peace
A body of irises
Light contact
stare-downs asking, begging for tenderness,
broken windows sleepless deprivation, dream worlding
A body of sounds
a body of sails and propellers
to catch the wind
transform sound into energy
sound into bodies tightly wrapped around a song
bodies made of tongues
that speak in my body to yours
asking for nothing in return for everything
A body made of
creaking beds,
rusty vowels,
defiant skeletons,
a vibration
a vibe
a vibratone
a viper of thunder
I surround myself
with you and my other bodies,
which in turn multiply into five bodies each
and those into five bodies each
An infinite
Human
sense
that doesn’t make a sound
unless a sound wants to mate
and my body is blindness deafness
where everything everyone everywhere
resides…

Solidarity with our sister Elizabeth Betita Martínez!

Earlier this year civil rights, radical, revolutionary thinker and writer Elizabeth Betita Martínez was interned in a assisted living center in San Francisco, California. This was a dramatic change of Betita, an independent, self-determined woman and leader. I am joining in to support Betita!

Betita's life work has spanned several historic movements and organizing struggles that produced deep changes, uplifting social justice. Active in U.S.-based civil rights and anti-racist movements that erupted onto the national and international scene in the late 1950s and 1960s, then the Chicano justice movements and through radical political movements since the 1960s, Betita was a community-based organizer and activist-writer forerunner initiating crucial social justice ideas, projects and organizations. She started the renown Chicano newspaper, El Grito del Norte, after moving to New Mexico, where there were critical struggles for land rights and self-determination. Later she was the first Chicana to run for statewide public office in California. She published in 1976, exposing the history of the U.S. bicentennial, the classic "450 Years of Chicano History." She re-issued the book in 1992, to also tell our story the quincentennial of the Colombian disaster, re-titled "500 Years of Chicano History." Betita said in 1992 that 50 years hadn't passed since the first edition but that this was a critical moment for the Chicano community to remember and understand the significance of 1492 and Chicano struggles for justice and rights.

Betita's political writings have been compiled in "De Colores Means All of Us" and her most recent work, a monument ensuring our collective memory is set right, 500 Years of Chicana History, where she weaves hundreds of biographies of Chicana and Latina women who have been leaders, organizers and groundbreakers in our freedom struggles and movements.

Betita has lived her life in service to our communities and in service to liberation. Now she needs your support!

Please show your love and support for Elizabeth Betita Martínez, a courageous and working class internationalist  thinker, activist and community fighter! She dedicated her life to community struggles of deep justice and human rights and now she needs your support.

Contribute as generously as possible. Make your checks payable to "Social Justice and write on the check memo "Elizabeth Martínez Project" and mail to:

Tony Platt
1607 Josephine Street
Berkeley, CA 94703

If you need a tax ID number email, Tony Platt at: amplatt27@gmail.com

--arnoldo garcía
c/s