[Poema 22] Resurrecciones

Antes de vivir una vez
he muerto tres vidas
La mujer que merece todas las vidas
ha perdido
las vidas que dio
ahora quiere resurrecciones
ahora quiero la vida de mis muertitas y muertitos
Quiero volar
resistir el terremoto de la gravedad
evadir las revelaciones fotográficas
hacer un discurso espacial en tus pequeñas manos.

Morí en 1964 cuando un pandillero disparó contra mi cabeza
estaba parado en frente a la ventana de la cocina
lavando trastes
caí de espalda
La segunda vez me hicieron prisionero de la guerra sagrada
y me auto-sacrifiqué enfrentando a los invasores en 1508
La tercera vez
fue en medio de una labor de frijol verde de primavera
mi corazón falleció de un ataque de cuerpo
muerta antes de que mi cabeza tocara el polvo de los zurcos.
Ahora mi cuerpo está siendo derrumbado
por una tristeza negrísima, oscura, sin estrellas, soles, y lucitas
Esta muerte se llevará acabo durante
una ataque por zángano militar de control remoto
O moriré de viuda y de madre
que ha perdido sus hijos a la guerra contra las drogas

Estoy resurectándome por cada poro de la tierra
Soy el levantamiento que emboscará a la éxtasis cristiana
El cielo se tiñirá de rojos, colorados, púrpuras, pieles cadaverales
Este no es el destino de la tierra
Este es el destino de la humanidad.

Y yo alegre aquí
de tu mano
de tus rezos
de tus sollozos
de tu roncura voz
que tropieza espíritus y alcahuetes
y mi ojos hipnotizados por el garabateo de tu cuerpo...

[Poema 21] The rain & the backpack

My hands have become the rain.
My lungs, the roots of the oldest birth
My belly-button, a volcano
My words, serpent-clouds.
My lips, the oldest, the place of the first and last, kiss of humanity 
I rain tenderness over your body
I breath the night into my womb
gestating a new day a new life a new land
I spew prayers and cries to decimate the solitude
of waiting for you.
I have engraved your voice on my skin
I have tattooed your sorrow in the hum of my sixth sense
Your cancer pounds on the doors
The rain bounces off the pavement
Everywhere we are alone
until you lift your face into the rain
The dark clouds are full of light
The clothes that have been left in the dryer,
unfolded, wrinkling
are signs
of a busy family
of a working class woman
of a farm-worker grandmother
undermined by pesticides and god
savior of our sanity, our laughter, our souls

*

The Backpack

White men get out of my way.
They see a brown man with a backpack
My backpack is on my skin and in my curly hair
My backpack makes their hearts pound nervously
what does he have in the backpack
will he hurt us
will his (my) body explode
into an unidentifiable carcass with inhuman dna?
The white guy decides to talk to me
looks at my hand clutching the strap over my left shoulder
as he makes small talk about the security line.
what line is shorter, faster?
He eyes my tattooed hands
Forces a smile and looks at my backpack again.
He does not like me
I am right behind him.
Little does he realize
that my backpack is filled with exquisite arms,
weapons,
dense neutron word bombs called
books
ink
notebooks
a laptop filled with notes, poems, photographs
dozens of pens and two or three fountain pens
cellphone, i-pod with thousands of songs from jazz, son jarocho, blues, non-linear weird space noise,
and cords for these gadgets erroneously called wireless.
I am dangerous:
Mahmoud Darwish is in my backpack, Palestinian terror lyricist
So is Mayakovsky, a suicide poet
So is a junior high school English teacher
author of an Indigenist Xicano terrorist novel called, Atomik Aztex
Shuntaro Tanikawa, who taught Coca Cola a lesson
The entire street of Al-Mutanabbi
A new edition of Rimbaud's "Drunken Boat"
The crazed workerist Franco "Bifo" Berardi, preaching uprisings in poetry and finances
AT the bottom of them all,
Vasily Grossman, soviet, russian, jewish writer who witnessed it all, wrote down the blood of world war II.
Yes
my backpack
is a bomb
the neutron bomb of backpacks
filled with liberating ideas, justice warriors, freedom theories
and martyrs who are reborn every time you open their lives
So yes beware the brown man with my backpack
I might just take your life and give you a new one.

[Poema 20] Metamorphosis

Socorro says
time doesn't make sense anymore
She counts the weekdays on her fingers
Monday
Tuesday
Wednesday,
mumbles
Thursday
Friday.
The name doesn't matter
every day is the same.
What matters is who is with you,
that's what the days should be called.
She laughs to herself.
The cancer
has transformed her
into a young, carefree woman
She giggles as the pain
occupies every cell of her body.
She is refusing her meals,
not hungry,
Then all day, she will sip on the Jarrito I brought her
Nibbles now and then on a chocolate cream pie
I show her the night-time photographs
of the take-off and landing of a trip to Mexico
after a few slides,
she asks are those electricity-breathing dragons?
I say yes and she laughs happy at the revelation
Then she covers her eyes
like the little girl she has become in illness
she is scared, she says.
The speed of the airplanes are making me dizzy.
So I stop the slide-show.
and we continue talking
about death,
how she is not afraid
how the night is the best time to live
how the nurses are hurting her feet
when she needs to be massaged with tenderness
The nurse walks in plops another meal on the counter
and Socorro ignores her and the food.
She starts again
I'm not afraid to die
I'm afraid to leave you behind
I don't want to go
until everyone is safe
until everyone is together again.
I will wait, too.
She stares out the window,
knows all the cars.
She sees Rafa drive up in his work truck,
tells me. Rafa's here!
She lays on her back
her hair thinned by the radiation
Einstein was right
one day all time will go in reverse
Today Coco is going back in time
she's becoming a frail baby girl
giggles at Rafa's silly jokes
she is curling up
her feet become slender boats
her hands becoming mesh bones with fronds of skin
She is waiting to be bathed
we ask over and over
after three hours of asking
she finally gets her bath
Then she puts on lipstick, blush
puts on a purple blouse,
wraps a burgundy colored silk scarf slacks
and lays there in bed
looking like an Elizabeth Taylor
waiting for a man, her man, to feed her grapes
and rub her feet.
Socorro has become butterfly and cocoon
she has been migrant caterpillar
Now she is becoming the beautiful woman again
She who disobeyed her mother
and ran away with the man she loved
Today she is disobeying everyone
she will not runaway
Now we are all running to her
the last matriarch of the six women
who created the people
who created the land
who created the wind
who created the waters
from their wombs
from her campesina hands
from her side
Socorro has become all six matriarchs
where we all now listen,
make music
tell story
We are going back.

[Poema 19] Socorro

Our mother
is wailing
her anger is choking her
she raises her face into the night
Her tears rain up into the darkness
Manuela is on the front step,
the only step of our home,
she is crying, wailing
the neighbors turn off their porch lights
the houses all around become shadows under the trees
Her husband
is in the back room
a tiny room that has a stove, a refrigerator, a counter
and room for one to stand and another to pass by.
José,
he is drinking black, cold coffee
his sun-beaten face,
his hands and skin
toughened as a bracero
etched in migrant seasons
bronced in the fields
joins Manuela,
who is crying just like the night
Socorro eloped with Francisco.

Coco tells me Manuela and Jose have visited her
over and over the last few weeks.
They ask her what she wants.
She says: Make me some frijolitos like before.
That's all I want.

Socorro does not hear the cries of her mother and father
In between sobs
they tell their gods
not to bring her to them yet.
Manuela wails and wails, she must live longer than me
she must see her great grandchildren be born
José holds Manuela at last by the shoulders,
puts his arms around the viejita
rubs his stubbled face against her neck and earrings
His breath and clothes smell of a Camel cigarrette
an aroma that only a farm-worker
can make into a memory of meals and laughter
after the long day in the fields.
Manuela stops crying
José is now whole again
They sit by Coco's bedside
and wait, listening to her breathing and dry her tears.

[Poema 2] Rolling Hills | The land does not forget

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Lomas rodantes | Rolling hills

Toppenish

surrounds

cornfields

hops

mint

asparagus

migrants

indians

and the weekly drug war deaths

Capital

of

the

Yakama

ancient salmon spawning rivers

where once Yakama stood atop platforms

with hand-made nets

tied to the end of long poles

catching

salmon

flying up waterfalls

or twirling, zig-zagging against the rapids

Where Yakama

Today the river is dammed up

dying from pesticide run-off,

cement, asphalt, carbon monoxide

the salmon no more

the Yakama fisher a ghost

spying on the orchards and agricultural fields

now tended by other Indians

Our homes

and

Our eyes

are surrounded

by rolling hills,

Toppenish,

in the Yakama language

That's how you know

you're in the center of Yakama lands,

Toppenish

Now a res

sobering up to the realities of capitalism

and meth-smacked young Indians and Mexicans

that is, young Indians all.

Men and women

who fall off the wagon

into their graves.

The Yakama

signed a treaty

with the United States Government

in 1855

ceding infinite land

to end one war

and start another

Where Indians

of all nations

of all lands

(Yakama, Mexica, Maya, Purépecha, Zapotec, Mixtec, Snix and on and on from other horizons)

die of diabetes, drugs, drunkenness

Where they call us migrants,

when we have been Indians all along

Now suffering the pain of hundreds of years

of occupation, disturbances, turbulent hard labor in the fields,

displacement, homelandlessness\planting, cultivating, harvesting
the winters, springs and autumns of shadows

that cast long into migration

encased in the one drop quantum

that has evaporated us

with the neutron bomb the U.S. has poured into our veins.

The central Valley

the Yakama's Valley

the Río Grande | Río Bravo Valley

The cosmic central Valley

with colchas verdes

extendidas

para abrigarnos

contra el frío del hambre

contra la eternidad Blanca

para dar vuelo emborrachado

a las orgías de las avispas

pollination sin fronteras

las campesinas son semilla y pollen

de la humanidad

que hoy se acumula

en el centro de las lomas rodantes

accumulations

of hope and communities

where matriarchs struggle against death

where matriarchs are surrounded

by the ancestors,

the brothers and sisters,

the sons and daughters,

the grandchildren

scattering into oblivion

 

Ella

es

una

utopia

donde

trabaja

la esperanza

de semillas

y zurcos

el arco

con flechas

para encajar

en el cuerpo del desastre

y vivirás

*

The land does not forget

The earth does not forget.

Men forget.

Women forget.

Countries forget men and women.

Some drown,

literally,

their memory

in alcohol

or in others.

The land does not forget

The land does not forget

how she was treated,

polluted, misused, diverted, distorted

by human consciousness.

The land does not forget

her own life, dust, plants,

seeds, creations, species, worms,

ants, the four directions, the seven spaces, water

and the mixtures in union with air, the wind.

The land begets life.

The land will swallow us, gestate new life, gestate new horizons,

The earth does not die, does not forget.

Rolling hills

Arnoldo García

Rolling hills

Rolling hills
ondulating around the sun
shredding the light
Toppenish became my home
drunk Indians and Mexicans
(that is, drunk Indians all)
Three syllables
three roots
dirt roads
hop fields
cornfields
sugar beet
mustard
asparagus
green beans
watermelon
the ranchers
drained the Yakama's river
to irrigate cash crops
White Swan stranded in the desert
three seasons and every winter
putting us in our place
My grandmother and my grandfather who took her lead
thought this better than Texas
where whites lynched Mexicans.
Here they strangled us
with hard field labor
Even the Indians had to changez
the spelling of their names, their homeland
so no one would confuse
Mexicans from Yakamas
Yakamas land forever from Yakima lands for sale
That is whites only
took their lands
and made us work it
made fertile volcanic dust
mesh with our sweat,
our dream of return
only to die paupers
without land, work or home
except in the cemetary.
Toppenish, rolling hills, makes
me dizzy
swallows me up
my soul is a tumbleweed
dried up at the mercy
of lost northern winds
Toppenish is my home
my horizon my word
my roots are also
buried there.
My hands lie fallow
I hibernate in dreams
of toxic-free seeds
and uneven rows
meant for walking
and not tractors
we grew up walking
migrant comet trails
blazing cornstalks,
green beans, hops
orchards across
the brown sky of the land
In Toppenish
you see everything
and you see
what you need to see
You cannot ignore me
or forget me in Toppenish
I did not choose this land
This land did not choose me
or my people.
Now she is mine and I hers
Toppenish is the wind become
mountains, hills, vallety,
volcanic path, migrant tomb,
laughter and bully.
the hills ondulate
cutting the horizon into my eyes....