#chicano poetry

[manwalksintobar]

They Didn't Get Me // Alma Luz Villanueva

To San Francisco’s Mission District, my childhood ground.

They didn't get me. I feel like the hunted prey that escaped

schools churches office jobs city streets morals anglo culture / western civilization / the democratic process dutiful sex free sex no sex 9-5 the perfect mother & " wife IQs / MDs / PHDs / USA delivery rooms with drs. in a hurry project walls a 1/2 inch white kids who hate black kids black kids who hate white kids mexican kids who hate light kids people who hate themselves & hate everyone The city was the hunter and the streets of my childhood were peopled with many like me— the streets soaked up oil& blood & rain & tears& dog shit & footsteps & love& children’s games & lives & piss & stunted trees & the blossoming trees on Guerrero St. & the hardy weeds that burst through the cracks in spring, especially spring, and the people, the people, the people.

They told us in school one time that a beautiful creek ran down Dolores St., and on Noe St. Indians fished for their supper, we were told— Can’t you just see cornfields spreading all over the Mission? And all that time, the earth wasn’t confined to backyards and fences and the "country"— the weeds kept telling me something I couldn’t hear— the earth was laughing and listening and singing all that time. All our destruction can’t touch it. It lies in wait.

They can’t touch us. They didn’t get us.

Under my flesh/this skin my heart keeps pumping my blood laughing and listening and singing inside me all on its own and I’m amazed.

[inthemoment89]

Piece

What kills me the most each day is knowing that a piece of me will always love you. I look back on us as the beautiful tragedy. I’m unsure of which was worse; falling in or out of love?

-E.L.A.

[missedwarning]

I’ve been around

I’ve been in your lives

In your dreams

In that venue

Where you schemed

I’ve seen it

Maybe from afar

But in my dreams

I’m keen to it

I still think you’re alright

I still think you’re alive

Somewhere far away from anything

I can do to hurt you

But I dream

Of these scenes and schemes

And hardly of the fantasy scenes

Hardly of the things that keep you fighting and biting and kicking and screaming for the real thing

I am flawed and I’m selfish but I try my best to keep it clean

[mythologyofblue]

In Colorado My Father Scoured and Stacked Dishes

in a Tex-Mex restaurant. His co-workers, unable to utter his name, renamed him Jalapeño. If I ask for a goldfish, he spits a glob of phlegm into a jar of water. The silver letters on his black belt spell Sangrón. Once, borracho, at dinner, he said: Jesus wasn’t a snowman. Arriba Durango. Arriba Orizaba. Packed into a car trunk, he was smuggled into the States. Frijolero. Greaser. In Tucson he branded cattle. He slept in a stable. The horse blankets oddly fragrant: wood smoke, lilac. He’s an illegal. I’m an Illegal-American. Once, in a grove of saguaro, at dusk, I slept next to him. I woke with his thumb in my mouth. ¿No qué no tronabas, pistolita? He learned English by listening to the radio. The first four words he memorized: In God We Trust. The fifth: Percolate. Again and again I borrow his clothes. He calls me Scarecrow. In Oregon he picked apples. Braeburn. Jonagold. Cameo. Nightly, to entertain his cuates, around a campfire, he strummed a guitarra, sang corridos. Arriba Durango. Arriba Orizaba. Packed into a car trunk, he was smuggled into the States. Greaser. Beaner. Once, borracho, at breakfast, he said: The heart can only be broken once, like a window. ¡No mames! His favorite belt buckle: an águila perched on a nopal. If he laughs out loud, his hands tremble. Bugs Bunny wants to deport him. César Chávez wants to deport him. When I walk through the desert, I wear his shirt. The gaze of the moon stitches the buttons of his shirt to my skin. The snake hisses. The snake is torn.

-Eduardo C. Corral, Poetry, April 2012

[ev0l]

and boy on those nights 

where the only things that care

to caress you are loneliness and discomfort

and weakness fools you into thinking

that there is love on the other side of a phone number

that should have been blocked and deleted

months ago - remember that those dial tones

no longer play the same melody 

the voice that exists on the other side of that line

no longer seeks to remind you of the piece of

divinity you are.

when you feel like texting her

be patient and

remind yourself that you 

no longer have anything nice to say.

[ashandabstraction]

Sonnet XIV from De Amor Oscuro/Of Dark Love by Francisco X. Alarcón, trans. Francisco Aragon

[hyphenatedamericanism-blog]

The Hyphenated American

'In LA we drive around / chasing the paletero—the one who also sells mayo smeared elotes / with sprinkled Mexican cheese and powdered chile, / then we pull up to a beat up taco truck / carne asada on fresh corn tortillas—cilantro, onions, and lime...' (excerpt from 'The Hyphenated American'

Check out my poem published by the Quotidian: a literary magazine. 

[saudadeinmoonlight]

where the strawberries grow

June comes as a messenger bearing memories of wet concrete during sunset the paletero man’s bell echoes in the street calling to the nostalgia in my left molars mangoñada is a summer kiss sweeter than the taste of the girl I am romancing I always believed my home was the yellow house on the corner but this is only half true I do not carry the house with me when I leave it is the smell of dirt on my hands that does not fade from the fields where the strawberries grow where the dreams of many brown men and women are buried in its soil if the fruits of their labor could break through the surface could sprout could flourish would I still carry strawberry seeds in between my teeth months after I have left? Would I still feel the need to always return?