We are all Picassos

We are all Picassos.

Todas y todos somos picassos.
My DNA is digital
my besos are analogue
I spin through space
two eyes here
two mouths there
the mother displaced, distorted, missing in Michigan
the father invisible, drowned,
dismembered on the canvas of fertile grandmothers
I arrived piece by piece across the migrant spectrum of soul
I will be buried and the earth will be whole again and again
My fate is twisted, a twister, a storm of tenderness
My days are here with you
My nights become DNA,
I spin and float reassemble
myself in your bodies
I ghost other worlds
parallel soul parking
fitting carefully between two bodies

My love is DNA
my hate is analogue
Borderless not wireless
My head leans against the head of Coalicue
My ears are pounded by the drumming
of wars plummeting through my skin
We are all artists
our tongues the brush
our veins the palette of colors
the rio bravo pleading to jump tracks
and wash herself of the maquiladora blood
Picasso made flesh offerings for our eyes to see
Guadalupe buried our placenta in her cries
Today is the day I will eat prickly pears with lemon and chile
smile against the sun
know that everything and everyone I love
will burst from my pores and my senses will make clouds
free the rain from the prison of pipes, asphalt and dams
Two or three more world wars
Ten, twenty, thirty revolutions
Where we disarm the men with guns and pigmentation
we'll get it right
we'll figure out how to be together
dance and not damn ourselves together
Wind
Water
Land
Our bodies return whole to the spiderweb,
gently feed the cosmos...

Small note to Billie Holiday

Will your love
defeat my sorrow
trounce my abandonment?

I will make the winter endless
so that you may never die.

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