Your daily dose of Chicano poetry
"I write poems on walls that crumble and fall
I talk to shadows that sleep and go away crying.”
Luis Omar Salinas (1937–2008)
Julian Lopez
2nd City
sirens, sound cannons,
the camera’s in your face,
feeding inflated tax rates,
undebated totalitarianism,
unsated cronyism,
modern day colonialism,
helicopters and humvees,
while the homeless freeze,
clinics close due to
insufficient funding,
who watches who?
eavesdroping acts,
protecting the boys in blue
quick to shoot unarmed youths
and the education system is daycare prison,
“more schools to open” in the charter system,
14 mill for the war monger’s weekend
chants.. drums.. listen:
the people are speaking
it’s labeled indecent, in a town that’s sleeping,
where material consumption is like a second skin,
and the media spins their only outlet for information,
the city of wind where nothing ever changes…
Julian Lopez has been writing for 13 years and his poetry can be found at http://blotsofthegreyblog.blogspot.com/. He’s currently working on a book. Lopez resides in Summit, Illinois.
Award-winning poets Roberto Tejada and Aracelis Girmay read from their acclaimed poetry collections in the auditorium of the Student Activity Center on the University of Texas campus. Roberto Tejada and 12 CantoMundo poets will read their poems from 8:00 pm to 10:00 pm on Friday, July 13, 2012. Aracelis Girmay and 12 CantoMundo poets will read their poems from 8:00 pm to 10:00 pm on Saturday, July 14, 2012. The events are free and open to the public. A reception and book signing will follow each night.
This free event is hosted by CantoMundo, a national poetry workshop dedicated to supporting and developing Latina/o poetics. CantoMundo provides a space where Latina/o poets can nurture and enhance their poetics; lecture and learn about aspects of Latina/o poetics currently not being discussed by the mainstream publishers and critics; and network with peer poets to enrich and further disseminate Latina/o poetry. The Center for Mexican American Studies of the College of Liberal Arts of the University of Texas at Austin is the primary sponsor of CantoMundo.
Biographies
Roberto Tejada is the author of several poetry collections, including Mirrors for Gold (2006), Exposition Park (2010), and Full Foreground (2012). He founded and continues to co-edit the journal Mandorla: New Writing from the Americas. He is the author, as well, of art histories that include, most recently, National Camera: Photography and Mexico’s Image Environment (2009), and Celia Alvarez Muñoz (2009). He received his Ph.D. from the State University of New York, Buffalo, and has taught at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM); at Dartmouth College, where he was the César E. Chávez Fellow (2002 – 2003); at the University of California, San Diego (2003 – 2008); and at the University of Texas, Austin (2008 – 2010). His writings appear frequently in exhibition catalogs. Tejada has published critical writings on contemporary U.S., Latino, and Latin American artists in Afterimage, Aperture, Bomb, The Brooklyn Rail, SF Camerawork, and Third Text. Tejada lived in Mexico City (1987 – 1997) where he worked as an editor of Vuelta magazine, published by the late Nobel laureate Octavio Paz; and as executive editor of Artes de México.
Aracelis Girmay is the author of the poetry collections Teeth and Kingdom Animalia, for which she won the Isabella Gardner Award & was nominated for the NBCC Award. Originally from California, Girmay has taught community writing workshops with young people in California & New York for the last ten years. Girmay has also taught at Queens College and is currently on the faculty of Drew University’s low residency M.F.A. program & Hampshire College’s School for Interdisciplinary Arts.
For more information about the event, contact Celeste Mendoza at cmendoza@cantomundo.org or Deborah Paredez at paredez@austin.utexas.edu.
Luis Lopez-Maldonado
1960…
CALIFORNIA
El Granjenal, Michoacán, December Traditions
I hear a little girl talk to me
on nights like this one, intimidating
and forgotten. When limp
olive trees cast their shadows
on my shadow, machete in hand,
I stop to watch. Is it a sin to closely
watch your cousin strip down to his underwear?
Uno de los Maldonado’s baby cries
and my abuelita calls for her yerba de Manzanilla.
Las posadas are held tonight on our street,
my sister chosen to be la virgen Maria,
my cousin as Jose— horses, a donkey,
floors drowned
in hay, a floating star lit
hung with the same wire
they used to hang my birthday piñatas with–
I am no one tonight though.
No role-playing.
The warm smell of canela boiling in large pots,
pan dulce arranged neatly in plastic
containers. This feels foreign to me,
like my mother and my father.
But I pretend to enjoy it and stand behind the old ladies
in their black rebosos. We sing in Spanish,
songs that relate to the Nativity scene
that once was before my time. The space between
my temples fixes on my cousins eyes
and we both smile under our closed lips.
A choreographed night and after duties disappear,
so do we, sneaking away, taking an extra Aginaldo,
going to our private hideout– the muddy stalls
of an abandoned home where a family
was murdered. In the dark we forget
about everything and caress each others hair,
and kiss each others lips, “for practice,”
pretending to be doing it to a girl.
But for me,
it was heaven.
Luis Lopez-Maldonado was born and raised in Santa Ana, California. He earned a Bachelor’s Degree from the University of California Riverside in Creative Writing, and another in Dance. His work has been seen in The American Poetry Review, Spillway, The Packinghouse Review and Cloudbank. Poets that have influenced Lopez-Maldonado’s work include Gary Soto, Federico Garcia Lorca, Cesar Vallejo, Rigoberto Gonzalez and Alba Cruz-Hacker. He is single and living in Orange County.
Xican@ Poetry Daily 