Voices from the fringes: Wild abrazos of climbing roses

Born in San Francisco, Lorna Dee Cervantes was raised in San José, California, a 40-minute ride down the valley on what’s now I-280. Her childhood was difficult—family split up, alcoholic mother, inhospitable environment both landscape and human. Her grandmother, of Chumash descent, was where she turned for love and support. Cervantes got a degree from San José State, then went on to study at UC Santa Cruz. She’s considered a major figure in Chicanx literature; she often expresses the confusion of living between two cultures by flowing between Spanish and English in her poems, as evidenced by today’s entry for National Poetry Month.

The San José neighborhood in which Cervantes grew up was razed to build I-280, a freeway that twice a weekday doubles as a parking lot between the South Bay and San Francisco. Here she revisits the area and reflects on survival and flourishing in the face of a dominant culture with bulldozers and concrete.

“Freeway 280”

Las casitas near the gray cannery,
nestled amid wild abrazos of climbing roses
and man-high red geraniums
are gone now.  The freeway conceals it
all beneath a raised scar.

But under the fake windsounds of the open lanes,
in the abandoned lots below, new grasses sprout,
wild mustard remembers, old gardens
come back stronger than they were,
trees have been left standing in their yards.
Albaricoqueros, cerezos, nogales . . .
Viejitas come here with paper bags to gather greens.
Espinaca, verdolagas, yerbabuena . . .

I scramble over the wire fence
that would have kept me out.
Once, I wanted out, wanted the rigid lanes
to take me to a place without sun,
without the smell of tomatoes burning
on swing shift in the greasy summer air.

Maybe it's here
en los campos extraños de esta ciudad
where I'll find it, that part of me
mown under
like a corpse
or a loose seed.

 

 

 

 

Voices from the fringes: The fraud of men

Well, hey, nonny—it’s Will Shakespeare’s birthday. His 457^th, to be more precise. At least, we think so. (He was baptized on 26 April, 1564, so the presumption is that he was born on the 23^rd.) At any rate, he died on 23 April, 1616, so it’s a Thing.

In all the years I’ve posted for National Poetry Month, I’ve never given you a song from one of his plays, so let’s rectify that today. “Sigh No More, Ladies” is from Much Ado About Nothing”, one of the comedies that deals with mistaken identity, trickery, sibling rivalry and really gullible men.

In keeping with this year’s NPM theme, I’m giving you a version performed by Cleo Laine, an English jazz singer. See what you think.

 

 

 

 

Voices from the fringes: We want to be fish now

I think I first heard about the writer and poet Saeed Jones when I literally heard him being interviewed on NPR. Growing up Black and gay in suburban Texas has clearly given him things to write about, and he’s a powerful and articulate writer. His 2019 memoir is titled How We Fight for our Lives; his debut poetry collection is titled Prelude to Bruise. Those two facts kind of give you an idea.

The poem I’ve selected for today’s National Poetry Month post is from that collection. It’s one of Jones’s more straightforward pieces, if perhaps wistfully fanciful. But it also makes me consider what the brilliant Daedalus' life might have been like after his son's death. Did he wander around beaches muttering to himself and wishing for Icarus to return?

“Daedalus, After Icarus”

Boys begin to gather around the man like seagulls.
He ignores them entirely, but they follow him
from one end of the beach to the other.
Their footprints burn holes in the sand.
It’s quite a sight, a strange parade:
a man with a pair of wings strapped to his arms
followed by a flock of rowdy boys.
Some squawk and flap their bony limbs.
Others try to leap now and then, stumbling
as the sand tugs at their feet. One boy pretends to fly
in a circle around the man, cawing in his face.

We don’t know his name or why he walks
along our beach, talking to the wind.
To say nothing of those wings. A woman yells
to her son, Ask him if he’ll make me a pair.
Maybe I’ll finally leave your father.
He answers our cackles with a sudden stop,
turns, and runs toward the water.
The children jump into the waves after him.
Over the sound of their thrashes and giggles,
we hear a boy say, We don’t want wings.
We want to be fish now.

 

 

Voices from the fringes: Witness my open palm

Tarfia Faizullah was born in Brooklyn in 1980, daughter of Bangladeshi immigrants who moved to Midland, Tex., while she was a child. In 2010, she traveled to her parents’ homeland to interview survivors of systematic rape by Pakistani soldiers in the 1971 war for Bangladesh’s independence. The stories she collected from the birangona became the subject matter for her 2014 collection of poetry, Seam.

Today’s entry for National Poetry Month comes from that book. An aubade is a song or poem about lovers parting at daybreak. Looking at how Faizullah constructs it, I see at least three possible lines of narrative, and I find it compelling from the title to the last line.

“Aubade Ending in the Death of a Mosquito”

          —at Apollo Hospital, Dhaka

Let me break
                            free of these lace-frail
                            lilac fingers disrobing
the black sky
                            from the windows of this
                            room, I sit helpless, waiting,
silent—sister,
                            because you drew from me
                            the coil of red twine: loneliness—
spooled inside—
                            once, I wanted to say one
                            true thing, as in, I want more
in this life,
                            or, the sky is hurt, a blue vessel—
                            we pass through each other,
like weary
                            sweepers haunting through glass
                            doors, arcing across gray floors
faint trails
                            of dust we leave behind—he
                            touches my hand, waits for me
to clutch back
                            while mosquitoes rise like smoke
                            from this cold marble floor,
from altars,
                            seeking the blood still humming
                            in our unsaved bodies—he sighs,
I make a fist,
                            I kill this one leaving raw
                            kisses raised on our bare necks—
because I woke
                            alone in the myth of one life, I will
                            myself into another—how strange,
to witness
                            nameless, the tangled shape
                            our blood makes across us,
my open palm.

 

 

Voices from the fringes: A high-end graveyard

Jesús Castillo was born in San Luís Potosí, Mexico, emigrated to California at age 11 and now lives in Oaxaca, Mexico. Along the way at some point, he earned an MFA in poetry from the University of Iowa. I don’t know much more about him. But I very much like playing with his poem “Untitled”, which is today’s entry for National Poetry Month.

Castillo said, about this poem, that the job of the poet today is to have fun and to observe, and to have fun with what s/he observes. So, here we go.

         Dear Empire, I am confused each time I wake inside you.
                        You invent addictions. 
          Are you a high-end graveyard or a child?
                        I see your children dragging their brains along.
                        Why not a god who loves water and dancing
                   instead of mirrors that recite your pretty features only?

          You wear a different face to each atrocity.
          You are un-unified and tangled.
                        Are you just gluttony?
                        Are you civilization’s slow grenade?

             I am confused each time I’m swallowed by your doors.

 

 

Voices from the fringes: Close to the whistling ground

Today’s entry for National Poetry Month is by genderqueer Chinese American poet and activist Ching-in Chen. Chen is currently an assistant professor of interdisciplinary arts at UW Bothell. Their focus is on under-examined lives in communities outside the dominant culture in the US, and I love their approach to making connections across those communities.

The Chen poem I keep coming back to is “South in Hundreds”. I’ve sorted out two narrative lines, but there may be more. It was inspired by the journey they took when moving from Houston to Seattle.

“South in Hundreds”

                 Missing one hundred.

for many leagues, i slept under
surface. couldn’t learn enough
to stay, couldn’t hurt along
midriff, scrum and scrub. see myself
rushing into tomorrow’s wet
world. thin trees almost ferns with quiet mouth
desire. took to cold high plain, only wind and a murdered boy.

started running at the first sign
of breath but there’s only
three yesterday heads speak in these fields.
so much to circle. always asking
to let me repair small chord between us.
you started lagging each step, dragging
the water, stirring up dirt. he still
refuses all nourishment, says everything bad.

an odd man rushes past, asking if
near swamp, still looking for signs
we’ve seen two girls on horseback.
not tired, he says, refusing to go to sleep.
we’ve seen very little all day, close to the whistling ground.
in this family, we don’t count sheep because we eat them.
we shake our heads no
under black light, we’re all deep stream, counting down cows.

as the man points to the tracks, they couldn’t have gone far.
         Still fresh, still fresh. 

 

 

 

Gratitude Monday: Neighborliness

A couple of weeks ago, I looked up from writing a bug ticket because a female mallard duck was peering in to my living room. Ducks tend to be like nuns—they travel in pairs—so I slowly turned my head and, yes indeed, there was her partner. I carefully got my phone and managed to capture this video:

The next morning I saw the back end of the female as she was disappearing down the slope, and then—maybe an hour later—a flash of something at the edge of the patio caught my peripheral vision. I assumed it was the butterscotch tabby that used to stop by now and again, but it turned around and I realized it was a fox.

Well, this is a first.

Okay—the ducks are a first, too. Never seen them anywhere except the ponds over at the corporate headquarters behind my cluster. I managed to toss out some bird food—grains and nuts—which they seemed to enjoy. But, except for the next-day visit, I’ve not seen them since.

However, Foxy has been by every day. But the clever clogs always manages to do it when I can’t get to my phone without scaring him (on the first visit, he stood at exactly the same spot where Madame Canard had been when looking over the living room décor, which is to say: about eight feet from where I was sitting), or at the exact moment when I was talking on a meeting call, or when the phone was charging across the room.

Also, he doesn’t stick around.

Friday, I tossed out the baking paper for an orange-cranberry muffin that I had for breakfast, thinking the birds might like the crumbs.

But blow me, if foxy didn’t swoop by and grab it in his slender little maw. Naturally, that was while I was chatting with a colleague, and I’m afraid that the latter pretty much got dumped for 93 seconds while I tried to get footage of Foxy, but it was crap. Also—I missed the owl that lives nearby, and which seemed to have had words with Foxy about whose turf this is. So disappointing.

But yesterday—triumph! I’d saved the skin from the salmon filet I had for dinner on Saturday, and tossed it out at around 0830 as fox bait. If I could have hooked up a fan to blow across the skin to spread the scent, I’d have done that. But—about 20 minutes later—M. Reynard appeared and snapped it up. I almost missed getting pix, because he’s a snatch and run kind of guy, but someone was out walking a dog on the path behind me, so he stayed in the ivy and ate his breakfast. Viz:

Then he came back to the patio to see if there might be anything else of interest.

So this is my gratitude today: neighbors dropping by to borrow a cup of breakfast and sharing my patio.

Though not at the same time, of course. That would not end well.

 

 

Voices from the fringes: Can these bones walk

When I went in search of poems from Lucille Clifton for today’s National Poetry Month post, I had the worst time trying to pick just one. Clifton, born in DePew, NY, in 1936, was prolific, both as a poet and an author of children’s literature. Her focus was on the African American experience, but so many of her poems resonate with me because they’re about women’s experience. Viz:

“poem in praise of menstruation"

if there is a river
more beautiful than this
bright as the blood
red edge of the moon          if
there is a river
more faithful than this
returning each month
to the same delta          if there

is a river
braver than this
coming and coming in a surge
of passion, of pain          if there is

a river
more ancient than this
daughter of eve
mother of cain and of abel          if there is in

the universe such a river          if
there is some where water
more powerful than this wild
water
pray that it flows also
through animals
beautiful and faithful and ancient
and female and brave

Clifton was Poet Laureate of Maryland from 1979 to 1985. She died in Baltimore in 2010. Her poem “slaveships” makes me think of Phillis Wheatley, as well as the way Christianity was used to keep slaves and their descendants in their (inferior) place.

“slaveships”

loaded like spoons
into the belly of Jesus
where we lay for weeks for months
in the sweat and stink
of our own breathing
Jesus
why do you not protect us
chained to the heart of the Angel
where the prayers we never tell
and hot and red
as our bloody ankles
Jesus
Angel
can these be men
who vomit us out from ships
called Jesus    Angel    Grace of God
onto a heathen country
Jesus
Angel
ever again
can this tongue speak
can these bones walk
Grace Of God
can this sin live