Presenting a handful of recent or soon to be published short story collections by established and emerging writers. If you like the short form, these books are meant for you.


Hotel Juárez: Stories, Rooms and Loops
Daniel Chacón
Arte Público Press - March 30, 2013

[from the publisher]





Blasphemy: New and Selected Stories
Sherman Alexie
Grove Press - October, 2012

[from the publisher]


Sherman Alexie’s stature as a writer of stories, poetry, and novels has soared over the course of his twenty-book, twenty-year career. His wide-ranging, acclaimed fiction throughout the last two decades, from The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven to his most recent PEN/Faulkner Award–winning War Dances, have established him as a star in contemporary American literature.

A bold and irreverent observer of life among Native Americans in the Pacific Northwest, the daring, versatile, funny, and outrageous Alexie show­cases his many talents in Blasphemy, where he unites fifteen beloved classics with fifteen new stories in one sweeping anthology for devoted fans and first-time readers. Included here are some of his most esteemed tales, including “What You Pawn I Will Redeem,” in which a homeless Indian man quests to win back a family heirloom; “This Is What It Means to Say Phoenix, Arizona,” a road-trip morality tale; “The Toughest Indian in the World,” about a night shared between a writer and a hitchhiker; and his most recent, “War Dances,” about a man grappling with sudden hearing loss in the wake of his father’s death. Alexie’s new stories are fresh and quintessential, about donkey basket­ball leagues, lethal wind turbines, a twenty-four hour Asian manicure salon, good and bad marriages, and all species of warriors in America today.

An indispensable Alexie collection, Blasphemy reminds us, on every thrill­ing page, why he is one of our greatest contemporary writers and a true master of the short story.


The Doctor's Wife
Luis Jaramillo
Dzanc Press - November, 2012                                               

[from the publisher]

Winner of the Dzanc Short Story Collection Contest, The Doctor’s Wife pushes the limits of what a short story collection can be. In stylish, intimate, and devastating short flashes, Luis Jaramillo chronicles the small domestic moments, tragic losses, and cultural upheavals faced by three generations of a family in the Pacific Northwest, creating a moving portrait of an American family and the remarkable woman at its center.

CRITICAL PRAISE

"I read Luis Jaramillo’s beautiful collection in one sitting. This is a ravishing book. I loved every word. It should be required reading for everyone." —Abigail Thomas

"The Doctor’s Wife is like the runaway child of Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust—Luis Jaramillo’s acerbic wit and satire are rare finds in America. Pick this up at once." —Alexander Chee

"The Doctor's Wife is story-writing at its best; lean, even epigrammatic, each of these stories offers a beautifully realized insight into the life of three generations of a family in the Pacific Northwest." —Scott Turow

"The Doctor's Wife holds great promise indeed." —David Abrams, The Quivering Pen




Mundo Cruel
Luis Negrón, translated by Suzanne Jill Levine
Seven Stories Press - February 26, 2013

[from the publisher]


Luis Negrón’s debut collection reveals the intimate world of a small community in Puerto Rico joined together by its transgressive sexuality. The writing straddles the shifting line between pure, unadorned storytelling and satire, exploring the sometimes hilarious and sometimes heartbreaking nature of survival in a decidedly cruel world.



SUZANNE JILL LEVINE's many translations include the works of Guillermo Cabrera Infante and Manuel Puig. She is the editor of the Penguin Classics Jorge Luis Borges series and author of The Subversive Scribe: Translating Latin American Fiction. She is winner of the 2012 the PEN Center USA Literary Award for her translation of José Donoso’s The Lizard’s Tale.



This should be a great exhibit. Several excellent artists (even a few legends in the bunch), and a commemoration of two people, Luis and Martha Abarca, who encouraged, preserved, and actively furthered the cause of Latino art in the Denver community.

click photo for larger image

City of a Hundred Fires by Richard Blanco

Erika Andiola speaking at The Capitol for Immigrant Rights

Erika and her mother, María

Jorge Ramos

La Bloga's Daniel Olivas interviewed Richard last May when Looking forThe Gulf Motel had just been published.  (Click here for interview)

Additional reading:  ColorLines article:  "Release of DREAMer Erika Andiola's Family Highlights Youth Movement's Power" (CLICK HERE)

Tino Villanueva

Review: In the Country of Empty Crosses
Michael Sedano

Arturo Madrid (author), Miguel Gandert (photographs). In the Country of Empty Crosses. The Story of a Hispano Protestant Family in Catholic New Mexico. San Antonio: Trinity University Press, 2012. ISBN: 9781595341310


The handful of protestant kids in Arturo Madrid's rural New Mexico public school struggled to voice their own prayer. Their pastor had forbidden them to participate in Catholic practices. "Forgive us our debts" the protestant kids insisted, while the Catholics prayed to be forgiven "our trespasses."

When Europeans first trespassed into indigenous tierra that would become New Mexico, those Mexican Spaniards set into motion a pattern for dominating what was there before they came, that would repeat itself when Anglos trespassed onto hispano land. Arturo Madrid’s memoir, In the Country of Empty Crosses. The Story of a Hispano Protestant Family in Catholic New Mexico, recounts impacts of that dominance.

Just as indios found themselves marginalized by the gente from down south, hispanos and their Catholic religion found themselves, too, squeezed out by foreign language-speaking interlopers as prickly as the barbed wire they strung after seizing land. Former landholders got their only compensation in the sound of a judge’s gavel echoing the Terminator’s command to the helicopter pilot, “get out”.

Interloper. As the old order changed yielding place to new, Arturo Madrid’s protestante familia found themselves interlopers in their own tierra not once, but doubly.

In the hispano community, they were outliers owing to their election of the anglos’ religion.

In anglo churches, hispanos were targets for missionary work, separate and unequal; bilingual hispanos attending the mainline services found themselves only a little more tolerated but advantaged as intercultural negotiators for gente who'd become interlopers on their own tierra.

Madrid opens the memoir with a telling illustration of hispano exclusion. Taking a sentimental journey to his familia’s former tierra searching for vestiges, the cosmopolitan Madrid—he is a Professor of Literature comfortable in elite Unitedstatesian circles—meets a local vato Madrid terms “the Marlboro man.”

The visitor asks the local if he’s familiar with a location, the long-abandoned places his bisabuelos settled. Madrid especially wonders where the old familia camposanto lay. The Marlboro man corrects the outsider, “you mean the campo herejes.” To some Catholic hispanos, protestantes remain heretics, 400 years after the last inquisitor left New Spain.

Madrid recounts a telling encounter with the anglo minister’s wife in Chama. Performing a self-imposed Christian obligation, Madrid and his mother knock on the parlor door with an offering of fruit and vegetables waiting in the truck. The woman cracks the door and gestures her visitors to go around to the back door. At the back stoop, the pastor’s wife asks through the door what she can do for the two Mexicans? Madrid’s mother issues a sharp rebuke, “do something for yourself” by accepting the crates of fresh fruit and vegetables loaded in the pickup.

We cut across the lawn and make our way ccarefully through untended shrubbery still wet with dew. The warm air smells of pine needls and pinesap. As we enter the shade at the back of the manse, the fresh smell of pine is displaced by the acrid odor of moist coal cinders. The backyard is dark and bare. Tall firs cut out the light, making it cold and dank as well. I am glad to be wearing a light jacket. The manse has a screened back porch, and my mother pulls on the handle to the entry door, but it is latched. (155)

Details like these add to the rich texture Madrid’s elegant prose creates throughout In the Country of Empty Crosses, the Story of a Hispano Protestant Family in Catholic New Mexico. Madrid has not written with retribution in mind, however near to revenge some incidents sound. Indeed, the author sets forth incidents as facts, allowing readers to draw their own conclusions about the cultural fusions and transitions that would create contemporary mores of his tierra.

A few years later, Madrid encounters the Marlboro man’s brother, and receives a decent welcome and useful information. Back at the manse, as they drive away from the Chama parsonage, the rude woman seems to be abjectly ashamed. And she’ll have to schlep the heavy crates by herself.

Madrid’s literary occupation shines brilliantly in this readable text. The writer avoids easy sentimentality, packing detail and telling incident without imposing a political stance that might deflect from the memoir element. For example, recounting that his boyhood home in Tierra Amarilla was the site of a raid by chicano nationalists, Madrid doesn’t mention the murder of the anglo forest ranger nor name Reies Tijerina as the shooter. Since Madrid no longer lived in Tierra Amarilla when he learned of the tragedy, the event is not part of his cultural debt.

Throughout his 213 pages, the author doesn’t wallow in regret that the rural New Mexico of Madrid’s youth doesn’t exist anymore, despite his subtly pointed illustration of inexorable change. The retrograde attitudes of the various brands of Christianity on display in the author’s memory probably continue to divide communities today, but that may be a function of individual venality rather than culturally imposed norms. Madrid chooses to omit such considerations.

Chicanas Chicanos who, like me, grew up in rural Catholic settings outside New Mexico will recognize Madrid’s tierra and its denizens, and that’s another good reason people will enjoy reading the memoir.

Raza are more alike than different, though differences inevitably crop up. “The manse,” for example, is the pastor’s home. The term jumps out at me for its unfamiliarity. Madrid notes the Baptists were ascendant in the local protestant community; I wondered if the sect had subtly imposed a plantation mentality to go along with their manifest destiny?

I asked a preacher’s kid what his family termed their home. It was always “the parsonage.” Other friends told me they knew “the vicarage.” “Rectory” is the priest’s abode in Catholic parishes. Webster’s tells me “manse” is common usage among Presbyterians, and Madrid’s gente followed Presbyterian dogma, diluted by that Baptist influence.

Madrid’s writing flows elegantly, a tapestry of memory he weaves or unravels thread by thread, laying patterned motifs with a word or image on an earlier page that the writer expands into paragraphs and rich chapters later. Readers will note lilacs, railroads, sunflowers, smells and landscape motifs. The story so richly textured becomes deeply engaging to the point the book’s liberal display of excellently wrought photographs becomes invisible. Once noticed, however, the fotos enhance the pages, illustrating more the ambience of the chapter than necessarily a single sentence. Photographer Miguel Gandert’s captions appear in the afterpages.

The book itself is laid out like an art book, so much so that designer Kristina Kachele places the CIP page at the back instead of obverse the title page. She provides ample white space via wide margins, generous leading, a pleasing serif font, and a page size that sits the palm without burdensome bulk. The publisher elected a medium weight bright white coated stock that not quite ideally supports the photographs, but nonetheless holds much of the detail and care Gandert invests in his exposures.

Cultural baggage being what it proves to be, I did not “get” the title’s “empty crosses.” Catholics display the crucified Christ on a cross, protestantes don’t. Madrid sees the empty cross, too, as a symbol of redemption, though who’s redeemed remains ambiguous and subject matter for spirited discussions In the Country of Empty Crosses, the Story of a Hispano Protestant Family in Catholic New Mexico is sure to engender.



Michael Sedano (mvs) - You tell about that resentful anglo boy who challenged your selection to lead a school ceremony. Did you see the memoir as a chance to get even with tipos like him?

Arturo Madrid (am) - Laughs. No, although friends have told me there may be elements of that. But I want to recount accurately as far as I remember. There is so much in our history that bears examination I have no time nor interest in getting back at people.

MVS - You write about the pressures of being a principal's kid (his father) and son of a local government official (mother), how you were constantly under observation by all eyes. Did your research lead you to read the book Preacher's Kid, about the same phenomenon?

AM - Several people told me about the book, so I might. I wanted to convey a different sense of history so my work didn't require much of that type reading. There are many contradictory tensions that come more clearly out of experience, observation, conversation.

MVS - The principal theme of the book is being an interloper. The anglos were interlopers on your tierra, yet you see yourself and before that, your parents as interlopers into protestant worlds. You don't spend a lot of energy investigating their motives nor addressing a justification for their determination to become cultural blenders.

AM - That was so far in the past and difficult if not impossible to know. They were biliterate and bilingual;  their parents were literate people. That is what their society needed.

MVS - The Tierra Amarilla raid  by La Alianza Federal de Mercedes was an awful event. You don't mention the murder or Tijerina.

AM - I heard about the incident while driving in my car, so it wasn't part of my experience. I met Tijerina years later and found him interesting and companionable. I didn't go into the raid because I was living in Texas and Tierra Amarlla wasn't my story.

MVS - You populate the book with lots of synaesthesia and visuals, there's a sense of longing in your narrative focus. What do you miss about your tierra?

AM - Living 20 years in San Antonio, in the city, I miss the open spaces and being able to see long distances, see mountains. I miss the smells of New Mexico, the piñon forest, the creosote bushes, the mix of smells after a rain.

MVS - Has time healed the divisions you recount? Have gente managed to subsume the hard feelings or do these divisions remain, perhaps as krypto cultural norms exacerbated by propinquity?

AM - In rural New Mexico people are occupied making a living and manage to put aside such divisions out of self-interest. It's different in the city where divisions remain and probably don't improve much because of propinquity and the nature of big towns.

MVS - What are you reading now?

AM - I'm reading Hilary Mantel's book on the French revolution, A Place of Greater Safety. She's a wonderful historian and writer who won a Booker Prize. I enjoyed Wolftrap. I'm also the judge for the Texas NACCS Book Award, and have five titles to read.

MVS - Miguel Gandert's photographs illustrate the book beautifully. But I got wrapped up in the story and tended to ignore the fotos the first time through.

AM - I've had that response from several friends. Miguel's photographs are so striking that originally the publisher wanted to limit illustrations to just a few but the images demanded to be included.

MVS - What do you want readers to know about Arturo Madrid as a result of reading In the Country of Empty Crosses?

AM - I want them to think this guy can tell a good story, that he has a good sense of language, and beyond that he knows how to use language to create a wonderful environment.


My 44th Anniversary


January 15, 1969 was a Wednesday. If I slept the night before, I don't remember. I had a 0700 appointment at the Santa Barbara bus terminal.

That final night my three best friends and I--Barbara, Mike, and Bryan--cruised the streets of Santa Barbara for one final look-see. At a stop sign--would I go south to Haley Street, or north and back to Isla Vista--a cowboy hat in the rearview mirror honked impatiently then he rammed his clunky pickup truck into us when I didn't pull away. Pulling around me, he honked and gave me the finger, screaming, "Fuck You, Four F." I exploded in laughter.

In the morning, with a Josh White tune running through my head, "there's a man going round taking names,"someone called my name. I hugged my wife and kissed her good-bye. I stepped onto the bus and in a few minutes, it pulled away. Barbara had kept up a brave mien all week as the clock ticked away. I glanced out the window to see she'd finally given in to her tears. Her hands covered her downturned face and she missed seeing me wave goodbye.

Forty-four years ago today, I reported as ordered by President Richard M. Nixon and accepted involuntary induction into the United States Army.


I was lucky that day. As a gruff Sergeant herded our skivvy-covered asses upstairs to the final set of examinations before taking the Oath, one Draftee sat red-faced under the sign that read "United States Marine Corps."


The Gluten-free Chicano
Las Dos Gildas Make Tortillas de Harina

Last week's Gluten-free Chicano segment exulted in finding the palo his mother used in rolling tortillas de harina. Because wheat is poison to the gluten-afflicted, the GF chicas patas shared the recipe for egg and tortillita as alternative to making flour tortillas.

This week, Las Dos Gildas, the renowned cooking site, provides a suitable recipe for those forbidden treasures. Gilda Valdez Carbonaro has amended the recipe to feature vegetable oils rather than the lard that produces the authentic flavor of homemade tortillas de harina.

The Gluten-free Chicano recommends using lard in the same volume of oils. Click here for Las Dos Gildas' recipe. Rolling a perfect tortilla with your mother's palo will have to be a matter of trial and error.

http://dosgildas.com/tortillas-de-harina/


On-Line Floricanto. Antepenultimate Tuesday of January 2013


Lacerated Dreams by Xuan Carlos Espinoza-Cuellar
A veces ~ Sometimes by Lupe Rodriguez
The Stadium by Kenneth Salzmann
Dream Warriors by Dde TheSlammer


Lacerated Dreams
by Xuan Carlos Espinoza-Cuellar

it ain’t got to be so complicated
knowledge should be available
free and running like water streams and shit

love should not be incarcerated
neither should dreams be lacerated
amongst barbed wire fences and shit

no body parts should feed the desert
no last breaths should be taken at the edge of dreams

why is it gotta be so damn complicated?
Filling out papers and shit
Singing hymns and chants to the empire
Why should some hide their red
While others call it patriotism?
Yet, the sinister of their practice is glorified and praised and shit
Praised like Jesus.. en el nombre de Cristo Jesus

A pregnant woman left to starve
While pedestrians watched
And children recorded
Children,
Children beaten by life
Children who beat other children unconscious
Drug dealing children
Prostitute children
Illegal alien children
Poor children
Poor colored children

Why has shit got to be so complicated?
We as a society feed off their flesh
Their voice, their fall from grace
We feast off their broken spirits
Cash checks over their corpses
And we demand more

What type of society are we
That we demand doom
While claiming privilege and shit?



Mother in Chains
by Colleen Krinard

bleeding silently at the edge of the road
mother stands weeping, watching, waiting.

they have stripped her naked.
and with greedy joy have bound and raped,
pillaged and plundered
her wholeness into tiny grains
of dust and rubble turned
to profit
by the kings
and queens of
paper green
and silicon ink.

her tears of broken waters fall
on muddied treaties trampled long ago
by a destiny so manifest
that it has lost itself
in lives of
ruin and contempt.

her soul yet waits for eyes of passion
and hearts of fire
to listen
and to hear her song
of coming home.

with ears of yearning
and arms outstretched she knows
this dance is not yet done.

come to me now
oh my children and friends
who know the joy of the
sounds of sunrise and
the quiet of the dancing stars and moon.

take your places around the table
once set long ago by dreamers
much like you.

find each other,
and in celebrating your homecoming,
restore us all.



A veces ~ Sometimes
by Lupe Rodriguez

I hear the voices of elders
in dreams
so close to me
I can feel their breath....
their warmth....
their touch so soft...
afraid to awaken...
to lose...
their touch and presence...
I remain.....
eyes shut even when awoken...
my palms extended and awaiting....
a touch no longer....almost forgotten...
es un sueno...just a dream...
A veces....sometimes I wish.....
I'd never be awoken of that dream....
que bonito sueno fue.....
what a beautiful dream it was.....



The Stadium
by Kenneth Salzmann

This is no game, remember,
Because the elevated rumbles still
Through the kitchen smells of each
Wave of ever-dark-eyed strangers
Ever cooking up strange dishes
Strangely spiced, and all the while
Slipping strange words
Into the spiced atmosphere
Hovering over 161st Street
To rise above the
Train's insistent jazz,
To swell into an unequivocal
Roar that will be joined by ghosts
As surely as forgotten ancestors
Will never let us go.
America is dark-eyed, too,
Against all its wishes,
And speaks in tongues,
And can't subdue
Its hunger for a common language.



Dream Warriors
by Dde TheSlammer

We came to live the American dream
We just found some nightmares along the way
We want the dream for our families
The good job
Shoes for our kids
Food in the home
Walls that are built
Not just shacked together
But sometimes when you dream
The events of your days
Can shift your dreams into nightmares
Meantime we work honest jobs
Making it ironic that we have 2 jobs
Yet make half the pay
Working twice as hard
Dreaming of the America we were lied about
The America we would have died about
The America that is a daily bout
Of us vs your lack of acceptance
But lately nightmare ideologies
Are creeping into our daily lives
Making even our accents suspect
To these Freddy Krueger “protectors”
Carrying batons that resemble
Razor blades bound in leather gloves
Used to slice our innocence like we were children
Molesting our freedom
Uniforms that look like sweaters
Stained from the black oozing
From their standard issue hearts
And red stripes from the blood splatters
Of mandatory beating quotas
Faces burned with the fire
Of their hatred for us
But we are dream warriors
Using our wishes to give us the tools
To fight back against the deformed society
That says we disgust them
But I know why you really hate us
Its because we are living
The first American dream
The one we were introduced to
The daily celebration of Columbus Day
To arrive in an inhabited land
And say we live here now
and in response you tell us
Papers please
Star of David
Skin tone mentalities
Arizona acted initially
To be in the middle
Of Nazi regime
Papers?
Please by all means
Because instead of wrapping smallpox in blankets
We wrap weed in the papers we use
To keep you manageable
Your government has its papers for us
We have our papers we govern to you
No wonder you throw us in joints
That’s why we drive low-riders
To prove we aren’t always high
We're well grounded
As in not going anywhere
Hell isn’t a place you leave
Just to go back because
Our wings got tired
We are angels who didn’t fall from grace
We had our land ripped from under us
You opened the ground
And it swallowed us
It was just a matter of time
Before we ascended again
Without the use of rope
We aren’t the bane of your existence
We are the dark knights of your redemption
Robin you of your false sense of superiority
And you two-faced jokers
Who like to use and abuse us
You are out of our league
Our shadows shine brighter than you
We illuminate the American dream
So you can wake up and see
That finally
We have come back home


BIOS

Lacerated Dreams by Xuan Carlos Espinoza-Cuellar
A veces ~ Sometimes by Lupe Rodriguez
The Stadium by Kenneth Salzmann
Dream Warriors by Dde TheSlammer


Xuan Carlos Espinoza-Cuellar. Xuanito identifies himself as a third world xueer/ista, mexican@, artivista, izquierdista, radical, proud person of size, estudiante y poeta. a person who believes in social justice and that poetry has the potential to revolutionize the world, cada palabra is a spark of consciousness, cada poema una transformacion profunda. A highly recognized poet and performer who dares to interrogate issues impacting our queer and immigrant communities. his performance ranges from cabaret to slam poetry. Xuanito has performed at several venues such as universities, gay clubs, book stores, pupuserias, glbt centers, straight bars and art galleries. his/her vision is one of reclaiming art from and to the margins, dignifying our forms of expression and use laughter to fight oppression and exploitation.

"Xuanito will slap you with knowledge and truth, and leave you wanting more."

Colleen Whitehorse Krinard, mother of six amazing and now grown life companions, has been writing songs and poetry since 1978. Singer, songwriter, poet, composer, writer, psychotherapist, social worker, energy intuitive, shaman, curandera, she has been called by one of her teacher-mentors, Dr. Arturo Ornelas of CEDEHC, Cuernavaca (Centro de Desarrollo Humano Hacia la Comunidad AC) ‘la bruja blanca que vuela con el viento’. Since being welcomed into this circle south of the border, her awareness of the history and current social-political issues pertaining to immigration and the relations between México and the Estados Unidos continues to grow and develop along with her process of moving towards fluency in Español.

Colleen holds degrees in Anthropology, Music, Social Work, and the School of Life. She has studied esoteric, metaphysical and healing traditions from around the world for over forty years, and utilizes and teaches her eclectic mezcla of this material in her Transformational Energetics sessions and classes. She has spent over twenty years working with people struggling with mental health, medical, and addictions issues in public clinics, offering specialized support in the treatment of trauma.

In the early years her work focused on personal themes; her poetry and songs were her way of coping with her experiences of becoming a single mother, a developing depression, and living with the after-effects of PTSD in her life. Pivotal changes occurred when she was exposed to a more global perspective of human history, economics and suffering through doctoral level coursework in Anthropology at the California Institute for Integral Studies in San Francisco, Ca where she learned about the creation of poverty and debt in the post-colonial Global South through the enforcement of fiscal structural adjustments and other colonizing economic policies.

Under the guidance of Dr. Wynne DuBray, Lakota Sioux, professor of Cultural Diversity and Mental Health in the MSW program at California State University, Sacramento, Colleen had the opportunity to identify and reconnect with her indigenous roots and values through a guided journaling project. Later, while working at Consolidated Tribal Health Project, a Pomo consortium in Mendocino County, California, between 2002 and 2005 she learned first-hand through the stories of her clients and their families of the traumatizing effects of racism, past and present affecting the People. At this time she also took classes in Native American studies at Sonoma State University, in Cotati, Ca, learning about both the legal-historical perspective of traumatization in a class on California Native American History taught by Raquelle Myers, Pomo, and David Lim, of the National Indian Justice Center in Santa Rosa, Ca, and also experiencing directly the resilience and creativity pouring out through Native American literature and poetry with Duane Big Eagle, Osage, Ok.

During this same timeframe Colleen was privileged to be in conversation with Edwin Lockhart, Sherwood Band Pomo, regarding local social justice issues as well as hearing about his personal shamanic process with fire circles, and how he was learning through dreams and visions, before his early passing.

Finally it was hearing John Trudell and his band, Mad Dog, in Boonville, California in live performance where the torch of passion lit the fire in her heart and planted the seeds for the application of her music and poetry to social justice issues.

Recently returned from five months living in Oaxaca, Mexico, she currently lives in Belen, NM, and works in a medical clinic in nearby Los Lunas, NM.

Colleen shares the following foundational concepts which guide her life and work:
we are not alone …
everything is energy …
everything is inter-connected …
life is a magnificent learning journey …
nature heals and sustains us and we owe a debt…
the full-meal-deal of life includes the light and the dark …
we learn by trying things out, mistakes are a good thing …
our obstacles are often the signposts highlighting our paths along the way …
we have an emergent need to learn ways to live increasingly in constructive and respectful relationship with nature in our modern lives …
why not smile, listen, share, learn, love and laugh as we go on our ways …




Kenneth Salzmann is a poet and writer who lives in Woodstock, New York. His poetry has appeared in such journals as Rattle, Sow’s Ear Poetry Review, Comstock Review, Home Planet News, and many more, and in such anthologies as Beloved on the Earth, Reeds and Rushes, Riverine: An Anthology of Hudson Valley Writers, and Child of My Child. He blogs at www.kensalzmann.com.


DDE The Slammer is an Indianpolis, IN native, but is born in Cancun, Mexico. He has been consistantly performing at opem mics and slams for the past six years. He has performed in several parts of the US as well as Germany. With poems ranging fom Mexican viewpoints (one of these poems had him practically banned from a restaurant in Indianapolis after he performed it) to video games to human trafficing to gas station danishes, his versatility can only be matched by the energy he brings. Self-titled leader of the "Bellyswag" movement, which is a movement that requires little movement, he has a large presence on stage in a figurative and literal stance. His CD entitled Common Sense Shoryuken holds a variety of poems and yes, the cover does have the button combo for a Dragon Punch

My Official Poetic License

Reyna Grande and Melinda Palacio

On Aaron Swartz

Reading Classics of Chicana Chicano Literature

Review: Alma Luz Villanueva. Naked Ladies. Tempe AZ: Bilingual Press / Editorial Bilingue, 1994.
ISBN 0927534304

Michael Sedano


Back when I was a single man, finding a companionable woman led me seek to learn what women expect from men. I adopted a strategy of closely reading literature by women, thinking therein to identify the standards I should aspire to achieve. It’s a good thing I married in 1968. I would have given up in favor of a hermit’s cave like Rustico in the Decameron, after reading Alma Luz Villanueva's 1994 novel, Naked Ladies, about one woman's liberation, intimidated by the standard set by Villanueva’s character, Alma.

Twenty years after publication, Naked Ladies stands as a Chicana Classic every man should read, simply to be grateful for the lower standard his mate, or prospective mate, tolerates.

Naked Ladies presents an intensely personal story of a single woman's change from dominated to fully in control. There is sex, violence, love, motherhood, danger. Gender issues and a woman's critical stance highlight the book's Chicana feminism. A high school teacher couldn't get away with the book's hot sex scenes nor its homosexuality, but independent young readers will find Naked Ladies worthwhile reading because it features a strong Chicana lead, a multicultural cast, and stresses the urgency for women of being decisive, acting sooner rather than later, and mistrusting men. Most of all, though, Villanueva proves that there's always an alternative way, options, from one's most profound crises.

The complete work is itself a model of alternatives -- Part One traces Alta's liberation. We watch as Alta sheds one burden after another. Whether by choice or by circumstance a series of crises lead inevitably to that day in her life that she's the remaining survivor of her past self, and she has to begin again.

Part Two takes us to 1999, a critical year in Alta's new life. Alta is rich enough to live in rustic surroundings and employ an apprentice. Since we last saw her, Alta's completed her degree, begun a successful counseling practice, and settled into a deeply satisfying heterosexual relationship with her apprentice.

Part One is Hell, Part Two Paradise. Part Two is fairy tale where they slay the dragon and everyone lives happily ever after. Readers won't sit still for this simplistic take on a woman's life. Villanueva tosses back a structural challenge, "If Life isn't like Alta's, shouldn't it be? What do you think Alta's going to do that would prevent herself from living in the world of Part Two?"

I'm uncertain that Villanueva believes most men capable of answering that. I feel defensive for men when almost every man you meet turns out to have been sexually abused as a child or is himself a child abuser, rapist, wife abuser, adulterer. Villanueva's pretty relentless in this so the pattern is inescapable.

Alta's love with Jade mirrors Alta's nascent experiment with woman lovers in the first half, when Villanueva delivers an erotic scene whose intensity consumes the two women. In the morning though, Jackie pulls away:

Alta turned from the stove, ready to smile. Jackie s face stopped her. It was cold, distant. Angry and embarrassed.
I should be going. I’ve got a million things to do today, and Jose has to be at his father’s at ten. Jackie placed an unusual emphasis on the masculine as though to set things straight. She was a normal woman, after all, her tone conveyed.
It felt like a direct blow to Alta’s abdomen. She fastened her gaze on Jackie’s eyes. Are you sorry about last night? 158

People should meet Alta. Villanueva’s introduced a Chicana who defines her life for herself. Chicanisma isn’t nearly as great a concern in Alta’s life as being a woman and mother. The great tragedies in Alta’s life grow from being woman not Chicana. The writer adopts a completely personal stance in setting out to encompass important events in lives of the writer’s women: April’s first period, breast cancer, love, raising our children, other people’s children, men, rape, abortion, sexual abuse, adultery, violence against women.

Villanueva gives all her characters an ethnic identity. Alta and April, the lead women characters, along with Jackie and Rita, are Latina, Jade is Asian and Navajo, April is dark like her mother, but her father, Hugh, along with Katie, Doug, Cheryl, and Bill are Anglo. Michael and Steve, Alta’s best male friends, are black. Yet ethnicity itself keeps its place in the background of the relationships, so the absence of Chicano or Latino men in Alta’s life is unremarkable. Further, Alta expresses her ethnic identity in several ways, the allusion to grandmother s wisdom, a casual remark like, Do you want some more coffee, loca? But while Alta hears familiar Chicano voices of protest, she feels more vitally moved by her awareness of womanhood:

An intense sorrow and longing filled Alta; so intense she almost lost consciousness for a moment. It was the child’s pain. "Yes." She saw her hunger, the shame of her poverty, the color of her skin, the sound of her Spanish being ridiculed publicly in a five-year-old’s memory, and an Indian language her grandmother spoke sometimes flickered like a vague, comforting dream that left her desolate because she could never remember, never remember, never remember.
Then Alta remembered the cries of her mother, the defense of her mother, the betrayal of her mother, the longing for her mother. Her mother. Her longing for a father had stopped at eight, and now she craved only a mother. 146 - 7

Personal satisfaction and sexual identity define Alta’s values, not the cultural nor an ethnic focus on Chicanismo. One might even argue the work is not a work of Chicana Chicano Literature at all, but of some different genre, whose author simply happens to be Chicana.

Interesting woman, Alta. But the Alta you know from part two is only a possibility--she hasn't done any of this yet, or if. At Part Two the time jumps forward to 1999. This hasn’t happened yet, the seeming perfect ending: Alta finds two true Loves. A good man in Michael, a wounded Jade. Michael deals with Alta’s love for a woman with a strenuous seduction of his own. Jade, on the rebound from a failed relationship, is gang raped and accepts Alta’s and Michael s counsel. Michael is Alta’s student-become-companion. Part Two offers to resolve every unhappy ending left hanging, as Katie dies to end Part One.

The younger Alta experiences power over a man in the book’s opening pages when Alta runs down the elegant purse snatcher:

And the woman, Alta could hear as she quickly rolled down her window, was saying, Let go of me, you fucker, in a steady, angry voice.
Within that silent universe there was only one choice: run him over: now. Right now.
The wheel turned without effort, and Alta’s aim was perfect. The beautiful panther-man wasn’t expecting this, and his face registered shock and pain as the front bumper caught his strong, lovely legs. He’d dragged the woman halfway down the street. Now he let her go and his eyes connected to Alta’s.

The reader imagines himself standing and cheering this woman, looking forward to the next few pages to see how Alta’s career unfolds from so eventful an introduction.

What follows is a series of tragedies mixed with moments of pure joy; small incremental victories that culminate in Alta’s conquest of the oppressive Hugh. Thus ends the first half of the book. Alta and Hugh have fallen into each other’s embrace a final time. Alta and inertia have their sway and Hugh dances himself into a frenzy.

I’ve been seeing someone since I was seventeen. I'm a homosexual. That’s what I am, a homosexual. And the man I've been seeing has AIDS. He's going to die. 140

Jade’s view of being woman has become twisted by a vicious gang rape:

Twice, during the night, she’d sat bolt upright at a harmless sound, but nothing was harmless anymore. Nothing had ever been harmless, she realized. Being a woman is being raped as a child and being raped as a woman, and then killed if it suited them. 202

Michael and Alta believe their ad hoc outdoor summer solstice ritual might provide a therapy Jade desperately requires. Alta may entertain her own motives because she loves both Michael and Jade. Alta’s keenly aware of Michael’s own enhanced sexuality in competition with Jade and Alta’s. Psychedelic mushrooms, wine, and group sex helps them perform a satisfying ritual and all seems well with mutual love and respect glowing among the three. As Jade and Alta couple, Michael watches from across the campfire, pleased at the women's satisfaction, not jealous of their physicality. There’s a standard for male behavior that readers will find incredibly tough to manage.

Villanueva doesn’t want a happily-ever-after ending, so she brings back Ray and Jim--Jade’s pair of cracker rapists--seeking revenge and blood.

Jim chuckled at the Sunday school brag. In fact, they both went to church nearly every Sunday, and if they didn’t their wives and kids did. The people in the church blamed “those feminist bitches” for causing trouble. They said those words inwardly; outwardly they said, “some folks just like to cause trouble, women like that” 263

Ray feels a strong gang rape-based camaraderie with Jim:

Yes, that first time. Sloppy seconds, then sloppy eights. Makes a guy feel closer ta his buddies. Like me an’ Jim’s tight now.

Jim, however, draws the line at one's own children, unlike Ray:

You ain’t messin’ with your own kids, are you?
Ray laughed loudly. Ya takes stuff way too serious, Jim boy. Ya jus’ be breakin ‘em in for mankind, the way I see it.
Does your old lady know?
She knows an’ she knows what’s good fer ‘er. Put the fear a God in ‘er right away. Ahm the man, ain’t I? 265-6

Alta hears this from cover but must watch helplessly as Jade and Michael get taken hostage. Just as Ray is about to rape Jade while Jim can t keep his hands off Michael’s genitals, Alta re-enacts the Will and power observed in the first pages of Naked Ladies. Alta shoots and kills Jim, saving Michael, then kills the fleeing Ray.

In a culminating irony, having just killed two men--one of whom, we learn, was raped by his father from age two to five—we learn Alta is pregnant, and her child has a barely distinguishable penis. It’s a boy.

They live happily ever after, a perplexing ending. Men who think with their dicks--and most do--are the enemy. But men are sons of mothers like Alta, so why do some men turn out like Ray and Jim or Hugh and Doug? Why aren’t more men like Alta’s son, or Michael?

Villanueva puts this responsibility squarely in the woman s hands, as if to say Alta’s way is the only road to any type of idyllic future: be decisive; take action; it’s a woman s world if she wants it.

But what about Chicanos like me, not up to my tocayo’s standards, nor Alta’s?


The Gluten-free Chicano
The Gluten-free Chicano Finds the Best Restaurant in the World

DiStasio's On the Bay
781 Market Street
Morro Bay CA 93442
805-771-8760

Wheat is poison, to the gluten intolerant. The most recent time the Gluten-free Chicano made a mistake and ate a sugar cooky he believed was GF, he passed out and was out of commission the next day. Finding restaurants, especially when traveling, is a game of lethal roulette.


Then a miracle.

The Gluten-free Chicano lined up a 8 a.m. to be first in line for that night's 4 p.m. opening.

On his annual birding photography vacation to Morro Bay, fatigued of putting Dorn's Restaurant servers through his standard close examination--is it thickened with flour? is there bread in it? is there wheat, barley, rye in it? would you please ask the cook and be sure? can I see the label?--he girded his loins for the ordeal and walked into an Italian place that for the past couple years had been an empty space next door to Dorn's.

The menu featured a few gluten-free dishes. When the GF Chicas Patas complimented the order taker on the restaurant's kindness, the vato offered a two-page gluten-free menu. Pasta, pasta, pasta, on the left hand side; pasta, pasta, pasta on the right hand side. Carbonara. Ravioli. Lasagne. Primavera.

Hosanna and I'll have one of everything! The delicious fresh-tasting marinara sauce was heavenly, ambrosial, on pasta. Pasta cooked perfectly and so good the GF Chicano trembled with fear that the kitchen had made an error and he'd be dead in 59 minutes.

Not only did the Gluten-free Chicano survive, he returned the next night for an expensive steak with spaghetti on the side--that wasn't on the menu and the kitchen prepared it just for the Gluten-free Chicano.

So the GF Chicano learned an important lesson. Don't make assumptions about Italian places. The best restaurant in the world is Italian. It's called DiStasio's On the Bay in Morro Bay. ¡Ajua!

A soupçon of bad news: DiStasio's uses Ancient Harvest quinoa pasta. As the NY Times reports--this indeed constitutes heart-breaking news, like the "fascist" comment Whole Foods' CEO spewed leading the Gluten-free Chicano to boycott the grocery store selling the best gf beer selection in town--there's a serious problem with quinoa:

Now demand for quinoa (pronounced KEE-no-ah) is soaring in rich countries, as American and European consumers discover the “lost crop” of the Incas. The surge has helped raise farmers’ incomes here in one of the hemisphere’s poorest countries. But there has been a notable trade-off: Fewer Bolivians can now afford it, hastening their embrace of cheaper, processed foods and raising fears of malnutrition in a country that has long struggled with it.

Good-bye perfection.



The Gluten-free Chicano Makes Menudo - A Naturally GF Food

I had been collecting güiros in the remote barranca near my grandfather’s birthplace. The old indio who makes my güiros was showing me new designs and I lost track of time. I would not reach the highway before darkness so I faced being trapped along the trail and at the mercy of wild peccaries, random cucuy, and the critters of remote darkness.

I knew better than to stay with the old curandero güiro artisan, whose conecta to cucuy had given me night sweats for a month the previous visita, so I made for a settlement deeper into the barranca, the güiro maker shaking his canas telling me I'd be better off spending a sleepless night halfway up the cañon than risk what awaited me further down the barranca. I reached the small village just after sundown.

Already gente were streaming to the tiny zocalo. Señoritas done up in their finest hand-embroidered blusas, the whirling colors of their full loose skirts and faldas mixed with their bright excited laughter. Their mothers gave me el malojo but I had a talisman from el viejo.

Small clusters of men laughed in the shadows, as men will, at some off-color remark or a prediction about the night's prospects. I kept a wary eye on one vato who had taken a dislike to me on an earlier visit.

A trio of musicos, a violin, a guitar, and a güiro, on the kiosko segued from a warming up cacophony to a sweet rhythmic version of Agustin Lara's Solamente Una Vez. There was a magic to the song I'd never sensed before, especially the long sweeping raspas of the güiro. Romance swept the plaza until everything became a blur of passion. De repente, I was whirled into the light to find myself waltzing with the most beautiful woman I had ever seen.

Candlelight caught her pupils and shone through her lustrous reddish black hair. The music drowned out everything but her eyes. The softness of her ample waist and soft sheen of sweat on her lightly pimpled brown forehead took my breath, and I whirled her across the dirt faster and faster as the güiro roared above the evening's magic. I was so intoxicated by her allure I thought I'd been enchanted and I was in a ghost story when someone pushed me into my partner and the music abruptly stopped.

"Hijo de la chingada madre, suelta a mi hermana, cabron pinche gringo." A glint caught the edge of the machete the vato brandished at his chest, pointed at mine. The shadows stirred, the dance floor rapidly emptied. I stared into the vato's eyes without blinking. Then I smiled. "¿Y tu, que vas hacer con esa navajita, mi'jo, rasparte las uñas?" I still have not decided what surprised the vato more, the reductio ad absurdum, my diction, or the fearless glint of my ojos hinchados and ruthless half-smile.

Outrage surrounded me. Vatos had bunched up around us thinking to see blood shed--mine. But in a flash of an eye I had disarmed their local champion and twirled his machete like a juggler with a chain saw. Much as the crowd wanted blood, they wanted it to be my blood, not his. As I gently pushed my dance partner out of harm's way, she reached her lips to brush her hot breath across my cheek. I turned to quiet the murmuring crowd...

To make a long, long story short, I convinced the mob to let me treat them to a bowl of homemade menudo. I was pleased that, so far from anywhere, the village had a Wolfe stove.


Here is the recipe that earned me a dance with every woman in the ville, and the hearts of all the mothers. Flirting Abuelitas hinted I should come calling on their nietas, pressing me with photographs whose subjects were avatars for every panaderia calendar I'd ever seen except without the arrow in a breast.

The admiration of all the caballeros reflected in the abrazos I got and all the tequilazos I downed. At dawn, after they'd tasted my menudo, the cheering crowd carried me and the musicos around the plaza on their shoulders.

Ingredients
5 lbs honeycomb tripe. (The fuzzy tripe is OK, too.) Put in freezer until half frozen.
1 head garlic.
1 large onion.
2 cans hominy.
Optional: 2 6" lengths of beef leg bone or 2 pig knuckles.
Red chile sauce (boil dried Anaheim, Negro, New Mexico, Guajillo, and Arbol chile pods with an onion and a head of garlic, purée, strain) or, 1 jar Gebhardt's chile powder, or 2 cans la palma chile sauce (puro chile, no tomato)
Six or more sprigs dried oregano (a Tbs or so crushed leaves)



Preparation
1/2 fill large pot with cold water.
Strip fat from underside of tripe, get it all!
Cut half-frozen tripe into 2" x 2" pieces (it cuts really easily when half-frozen).
Put the panza into the pan and add the chile, unpeeled head of garlic ditto the onion, (you'll remove these later), oregano, tbs salt. optional a bay leaf.

You can make a chicano bouquet garni by wrapping the ajo, cebolla, sprigs of oregano, in cheesecloth and tying into a bag. Dip the bay leaf into the boiling broth then take it out in 5 minutes.

Turn up the heat. When the pot begins boiling, lower the flame to a medium simmer, cover, 3-4 hours. If you are in a hurry, boil the hell out of it for an hour and a half, (or pressure cook it for 1 minute after the vapor cap starts rocking).


Monitor to ensure you don't reduce the tripe to soft squishy unpalatable gunk. The meat is done when, with a bit of effort, you can cut it with the edge of a fork.


I add the hominy when the tripe is nearly done. Dump the cans of hominy, water and all, into the menudo and add more water if you need more soup. Adjust the flavor: more salt, more chile for flavor or for picoso.

Garnishes are important. Diced onion, cilantro leaves, crushed chile de arbol or chile piquin, oregano leaves. Lemon or lime halves--do not use this recipe and serve quartered limón, or a cucuy will haunt you.

For an authentic touch, put a peeled onion cut in half and a knife on the table so diners can score the onion then slice the diced cebolla directly into the bowl.

Serve with hot tortilla de maíz. Wheat-eaters sharing your table will enjoy bolillos or tortilla de harina.


La Bloga On-Line Floricanto Penultimate Tuesday in January 2013
David Lester Young, Joe Navarro, Odilia Galván Rodríguez , Sonia Gutiérrez, Andrea Mauk


USS Constitution by David Lester Young
I Understand Peace, Equality, Justice and Hope (Remembering Dr. King on His Birthday) by Joe Navarro
Spirit Tree of Life By Odilia Galván Rodríguez
Song for a New Civilization by Sonia Gutiérrez
Dreams Manufactured Daily (Just Follow Along) by Andrea Mauk


USS Constitution
by David Lester Young

Ironsides iron will in Star Spangled Banner fortitude,
Deed born within a birthright Bill of Rights of longitude
Sharing latitude of sea to shining sea’s sailing Constitution
“We the people” are the strength of power point composition.

A Free Press salvo must carry its Declaration of Independence
Of editorial integrity found within questing power Truth dependence
That a writer never fears the Executive Privilege wrath of domination
That Free Speech patriotism is an imperative birth-write condition.

America is this 100% civilian elected and owned - run government,
The President, Congress, officials are not incorporated governance,
Where Conglomerates buy political stables in campaign investments.
That Special Interests must never be above neighborhood vestments.

That clothing covering our elected officials shares a Pledge of Allegiance
To this nation, but never to any Demigod of Incorporation with grievances
That threatens public officials by holding them hostage in signed contracts.
That in 1776 America divorced Royal proclamations with charter subcontracts.

America’s founding father principles are in business venture stock capitalism.
That America Dream made for people to own, invest in business commercialism
That found its American inheritance in a born in America proud vested heritage
That should never outsource our America’s Blue Collar heart and soul lineage.

Yet, fiscal cliff deconstruction seeks to destroy America from within this loyalty
That gives out tax free entitlements in Goliath welfare that shares corporate royalty.
Then this economic boa constrictor says we cannot afford civilian Social Security,
After they raped and pillaged America’s business pension plans for their futurity.

Robbing Hood barons, monster media moguls, bank-sters bankrupting Americans
Getting paid bonuses creating a 10% dominion of Conservative States of America,
Their wrath reaping havoc on the floundering USS Constitution in troubled waters
Forcing it onto fiscal cliffs without the rudder of Congress into economic slaughter.

But hear that murmur,
Feel that thunder,
See America’s heart beat coming alive,
Sense that spirit in “We the people” birthrights
That deed of inherited individual patriotism
In Star Spangled Banner-ed in F. Scott KEYS.
That Freedom, Democracy, Liberty in Free Speech,
Is not a obscenity, but this imperative necessity
That “We the people” must shout out aloud NUTS
N-ever U-nder T-yranny S-urrender
The USS Constitution.




I Understand Peace, Equality, Justice and Hope (Remembering Dr. King on His Birthday) 
by Joe Navarro

I understand peace, equality,
Justice and hope
Paz, igualidad, justicia
Y esperanza, even though
They sometimes remain
Elusive, the same as
Catching clouds and rainbows
The ideals are etched in
My vocabulario, en dos idiomas
I think of them in English
And español in hopes that
Two languages can cross
The threshold of oppression
I stopped dreaming in
Abstract lofty ideals that
No one can achieve without
Struggle, without un movimiento
This is what I learned that from an
Inspiration that roared from
The mind and lips of
A gentle man who stood
Unwaiveringly, face to face
With with the anti-human
Racial construct that declared
Itself superior to all on la Tierra
I was one of those chavelitos
Who listened to the spiritual discourse
For humanity against the dangers
Of racial, ethnic and international
Domination through violence,
Brutality and subjugation
I listen to the revolutionary cry to
Value la gente, human beings
Over commodities and a denunciation
Of crass materialism and racism
I listened to a giant, rich of corazón
A humble man who loved toda la gente
But despised the haters and dominators
A man who was a powerful orator
Who spoke out, even against
The threats of the most powerful
Nation on Earth, I learned from
The wise man, The Reverend Dr.
Martin Luther King, Jr who lived and died
Awakening the humanity of
People who were tired of living
Under the heels of others
Then fear and loathing traveled
From the barrel of a gun into
His physical existence on la Tierra
Yet he arose again as winged
Consciousness, a free spirit that
Traveled far and wide into the
Hearts and minds of those
Who would listen and learn
Someone, like me


Spirit Tree of Life 
by Odilia Galván Rodríguez

Dedicated to Chief Theresa Spence and the Idle No More Movement

spirit tree tied with sacred direction colors
prayer offerings full of hopes and dreams
fears are kept at bay by sacrificing
and opening to the possibilities of prophecy
fulfilled wishes for better days of promise
a cleansing snow covers the sleeping ground
waiting for the first awakening of green


Song for a New Civilization
by Sonia Gutiérrez

You take the only thing
you have left to record
a people’s history—
a shard of glass and a mirror.

You write about the courage
of canons and muskets.
You include the tapered sound
of fleeting ducks fleeing
from the squeeze of an AR-15.

You press heavily on the shard
and see bodies lined up—
covered in plastic and crimson stars.

One round after another
and another, bullets from boys and men
they called strange birds. Birds
who in their silence inherited
centuries of indifference.

Every time the mirror speaks,
you gasp, pledging to innocence
that these deaths were not in vain.
You take a torn shirt and wipe
the shard of glass and mirror,
and hand wash the stars with tears
as soap suds turn a brick red.

You take the clean mirror and hold it
up high, sharing its vision
for a new civilization.

The mirror takes the boy’s toy grenade
and arms his eyes with justice.
Takes the boy’s hate
and nurtures his mind with happiness.
Takes the boy’s loneliness
and gives him a community of listeners.
Takes the boy’s silence
and arms his tongue with words.
Takes the boy’s fear
and teaches him true brotherhood.

The mirror speaks for our children
so one day these boys and men
on a whim do not wear the mask
of strange birds and in their delusion
rob us of our sisters, our grandfathers,
our teachers, our classmates,
our neighbors, our brothers,
our own children—their own future.


Dreams Manufactured Daily (Just Follow Along)
by Andrea Mauk

Nothing ever seems to happen
in a minute, an hour, a day,
until I look back on my life as a whole,
then I can marvel at the many things I've done
that people told me I wouldn't accomplish,
couldn't accomplish,
cuz after all, who was I?
A girl walking a tightrope
hangin' onto a balloon filled with helium dreams,
and stardust wishes.
A chubby girl with a potentially lethal
autoimmune disease.
A fool.

You'll be back, they assured me
to the beep of the scanner,
to the graveyard shift
on the West side of Phoenix
where the women sometimes
don't get into the store
without getting their purse ripped from their arms,
their faces bloodied by the butt
of a pistol
by young men who exchange their dignity
for a quick crack high.

You'll be back, they promised,
to the Valley of the Sun
and its inbred economy
where you can watch them play golf and ride horses
and swim all day long
as you make the beds
and vacuum the carpets.
You'll long for a promotion,
a job in an office where
you don't have to wear a uniform.

You'll never leave, not for long.
You can't break free of the heat that's
embedded in your pores,
the streets you can't drive down twice
because your car is too low,
your talent that's been stifled
by a wanna-be metropolis
laid out on a perfect grid
and its need to organize its people
like the rainbow of garments
in a walk-in closet,
and besides,
your music's all wrong.

Every day,
I read the sign like a mantra,
43rd Avenue next exit,
Los Angeles 356 miles
and I sang like Bootsy Collins,
'Hey, L.A. Califor- NI-AYY,
City of Angels, Hollywood.'
I counted the trips, 1, 2, 3, 57...
until the one time when I'd
pass 43rd and keep going.

I have been back
many times
to visit
and I might even consider
going back to retire
but I never went back
because I didn't succeed
or have the courage
to follow my dreams.
I left with my paintbrush,
my pencils and paper,
my sheet music, microphone
and a determination
that no matter what teachers said,
or parents predicted, or how friends laughed,
I could not be told
who I was supposed to become.

On certain days when I get to feeling
like nothing's working out as planned,
in the hardest moments when I cannot
find a way to believe in myself,
I drive past something, an image, a sign
an icon of some kind that reminds me,
Oh yeah, this is Hollywood, a place
where dreams are manufactured daily.
That's why I came here.
I have used my paintbrush,
my pencils and paper,
my microphone.
I didn't have to come here to be a dreamer,
I was born that way,
but the only dream I held tight to in Phoenix
was being able to leave it behind.


Bios
USS Constitution by David Lester Young
I Understand Peace, Equality, Justice and Hope (Remembering Dr. King on His Birthday) by Joe Navarro
Spirit Tree of Life By Odilia Galván Rodríguez
Song for a New Civilization by Sonia Gutiérrez
Dreams Manufactured Daily (Just Follow Along) by Andrea Mauk


David Lester Young. Born Akron, Ohio. Graduated Tallmadge High School. Associate Degree University Of Southern Indiana. Creative Writer Poet Philosopher. Present location Panama City Beach, FL.

Started writing around 1970 after being honorably discharged from the Vietnam War. I started by writing poems and thoughts on napkins. Today, I start six or seven a day, some get finished, others do not.

I always have written under D. Lester Young. I also use Franklin Doppelganger, because of my resemblance to Ben Franklin, a person I greatly respect and whose ideas I find are worth using Free Speech about. I do write daily quotes like; “Free Speech is not obscenity but a necessity. Franklin Doppelganger 01/12/13

My poetry can be found by using GOOGLE and typing in David Lester Young. You can also go to the Authorsden.com site, and look up my name, David Lester Young.


Joe Navarro is a literary vato loco, teacher, poet, creative writer, husband, father and grandfather who currently lives in Hollister, CA. Joe integrates his poetic voice with life's experiences, and blends culture with politics. His poetic influences include the Beat Poets, The Last Poets, Amiri Baraka, Sonia Sanchez, Alurista, Gloria Anzaldua, Lalo Delgado and numerous others. You can read more from Joe at www.joenavarro.weebly.com.



Odilia Galván Rodríguez, poet/activist, writer and editor, has been
involved in social justice organizing and helping people find their
creative and spiritual voice for over two decades. Her poetry has been
widely anthologized, and she is the author of three books. Her last editing
job was as the English edition editor of Tricontinental Magazine in Havana, Cuba.
Odilia is one of the founding members and a moderator of Poets
Responding to SB 1070 on Facebook. She teaches creative writing
workshops nationally, currently at Casa Latina, and also co-hosts,
"Poetry Express" a weekly open mike with featured poets, in Berkeley,
CA. For more information about workshops see her blog http://xhiuayotl.blogspot.com/
or contact her at Red Earth Productions & Cultural Work 510-343-3693.

Sonia Gutiérrez is a poet professor, who promotes social justice and teaches English Composition and Critical Thinking and Writing at Palomar College. Her poetry, guest columns, and vignettes have been published in La Bloga’s On-line Floricanto, FRONTERA-ESQUINA, The San Diego Poetry Annual, La Jornada Semanal, AlternaCtive PublicaCtions, and contratiempo: pensamiento latinoamericano en USA. Her bilingual poetry collection, Spider Woman/La Mujer Araña (Olmeca Press), is forthcoming in 2013. She is at work on her novel, Kissing Dreams from a Distance, among other projects. To learn more about Sonia, visit her blog, Chicana in the Midst, and muy pronto at www.soniagutierrez.com.


Andrea García Mauk grew up in Arizona, where both the immense beauty and harsh realities of living in the desert shaped her artistic soul. She calls Los Angeles home, but has also lived in Chicago, New York and Boston. She has worked in the music industry, and on various film and television productions. She writes short fiction, poetry, original screenplays and adaptations, and is currently finishing two novels. Her writing and artwork has been published and viewed in a variety of places such as on The Late, Late Show with Tom Snyder; The Journal of School Psychologists and Victorian Homes Magazine. Both her poetry and artwork have won awards. Several of her poems and a memoir are included in the 2011 anthology, Our Spirit, Our Reality, and her poetry is featured in the 2012 Mujeres de Maiz “‘Zine.” She is a regular contributor to Poets responding to SB 1070. Her poems have been chosen for publication on La Bloga’s Tuesday Floricanto numerous times. She is also a moderator of Diving Deeper, an online workshop for writers, and has written extensively about music, especially jazz, while working in the entertainment industry. Her production company, Dancing Horse Media Group, is currently in pre-production of her independent film, “Beautiful Dreamer,” based on her original screenplay and manuscript, and along with her partners, is producing a unique cookbook that blends healthful recipes with poetry and prose from the community.

Recién terminó mi residencia de seis semanas en una escuela primaria de Denver como escritora invitada.  Trabajé con niños de 1ro y 2do grado en actividades de escritura creativa, lo cual resultó ser una de las experiencias más gratas y conmovedoras que he tenido en mucho tiempo.

Por lo general, el trabajo de escritura creativa con estudiantes de primaria se enfoca en la poesía, género que los pequeños suelen manejar con una naturalidad impresionante, cualidad que a los pocos años, y sin explicación alguna, se desvanece sin dejar huella.  ¿Será la brevedad del vocabulario o de las experiencias lo cual les acerca a esta tierna edad al ideal de la concisión? ¿El ignorar tradiciones o convenciones? ¿O el no haber desarrollado aun ese miedo al juicio ajeno sobre la escritura?

En el trabajo de cada uno brilla la palabra como si hubiera sido pronunciada por primera vez. Esto ocurre a diario y sin revuelo. Aun en los rincones más inesperados...

Una compañera del programa de escritores en las escuelas (WITS, por sus siglas en inglés) la poeta María Meléndez, tiene como lema lo siguiente: "Espera magia de todos". Y sin falta, la magia se cumple.

Los escritos de los chicos, siempre ilustrados, iluminan los grandes temas: el calor familiar, la magia de un día de juego, la alegría de tener un amigo especial con quien compartir...

El tiempo se nos escapa. El suyo. El nuestro... Me doy la vuelta y es hora de irme.


Los chicos se despiden con abrazos y mensajes de agradecimiento por todo lo que aprendieron, pero yo me voy con la certeza de que quien más aprendió fui yo.

Una vez de regreso a mis estudiantes universitarios, tan serios, tan enfocados, tan tacaños con las palabras --¡a pesar de tener tantas!-- me sorprendo extrañando el bullicio de los pequeños, sus imágenes crujientes, coloridas y olorosas a palomitas de maíz, y el abrazo de los cuarenta brazos...

De repente, un estudiante me interrumpe violentamente el recuerdo y pregunta con urgencia si esto también saldrá en el examen...

¿Cómo llegamos de allá a acá?

O mejor aun, ¿cómo regresamos?

My last postlisted some outstanding recent or soon-to-be-published short story collections. Here's one more that I think La Bloga's readers will appreciate.

Manuel Gonzales

 
The Miniature Wife
Manuel Gonzales
Riverhead - January, 2013

[from the publisher]

In the tradition of George Saunders and Aimee Bender, an exuberantly imagined debut that chronicles an ordinary world marked by unusual phenomena.

The eighteen stories of Manuel Gonzales’s exhilarating first book render the fantastic commonplace and the ordinary extraordinary, in prose that thrums with energy and shimmers with beauty. In “The Artist’s Voice” we meet one of the world’s foremost composers, a man who speaks through his ears. A hijacked plane circles a city for twenty years in “Pilot, Copilot, Writer.” Sound can kill in “The Sounds of Early Morning.” And, in the title story, a man is at war with the wife he accidentally shrank. For these characters, the phenomenal isn’t necessarily special—but it’s often dangerous.

In slightly fantastical settings, Gonzales illustrates very real guilt over small and large marital missteps, the intense desire for the reinvention of self, and the powerful urges we feel to defend and provide for the people we love. With wit and insight, these stories subvert our expectations and challenge us to look at our surroundings with fresh eyes. Brilliantly conceived, strikingly original, and told with the narrative instinct of a born storyteller, The Miniature Wife is an unforgettable debut.

Manuel Gonzales is a graduate of the Columbia University graduate creative writing program. He has published fiction and nonfiction in Open City, Fence, One Story, Esquire, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, and The Believer. He lives in Austin, Texas, with his wife and two children.

"It's easy to compare Manuel Gonzales to George Saunders, but it would be just as easy to compare him to Borges or Márquez or Aimee Bender. In his debut collection, a hijacked plane circles Dallas for 20 years. There are unicorns, werewolves, fighting robots. He makes the extraordinary ordinary, and his playfulness is infectious. Gonzales is at his best in his flash pieces -- like 'Cash to a Killing' -- three-to-five pagers that explode like gunfire."  Esquire




And here's my short review of one of the short collections noted in my last post.



Mundo Cruel
Luis Negrón
Translated by Suzanne Jill Levine
Seven Stories Press - February 26, 2013

The marketing for this book informs readers that Mundo Cruel is Negrón's debut collection of short stories; that it was published in Spanish back in 2010 (now in a third edition); that the author lives in Santurce, Puerto Rico; that he is easily compared to the celebratedManuel Puig; and that he is the coeditor of Los otros cuerpos, an anthology of queer writing from Puerto Rico and the Puerto Rican diaspora.

So, that's all fine and good, but how about the actual book? Let me say that the nine short stories in this slim volume provide a strong hint that Luis Negrón is the real deal in terms of an authentic voice, a rich talent, and an insightful eye.

Luis Negrón

Characterization is king in the court of short stories. Negrón's characters bounce off the page deep into the reader's mind, where they sizzle and pop, waiting to explode:  Naldi, the man who desperately pleads to his "friend" Sammy for money to take his dying dog to a taxidermist; José A. and Pachi, "the most fabulous and spectacular boys in the bar" whose world crashes the night homophobia is officially ended; the two women, mean-spirited and hypocritical, who gossip in their front yards about a neighbor's boy they suspect of being gay; the teenage boy beaten by his father who finds that his new face is a magnet to men. These characters live and breathe in a sensual, provocative, sometimes violent, often humorous world - our world, a fictional reality brought to life by the gifted hand of Luis Negrón.

There is sex in the stories, quite a bit, but these are not erotic stories, nor are they about sex. The stories also have laughter, irony, sadness, and beauty. The reader is privy to the longing of marginalized people. We share dark secrets whispered in the warm breeze of a Puerto Rican night. We watch in amazement, or horror, as the characters act out their unique daily lives. They are unaware that they are unique, and their passions, failures and triumphs are revealed only because the author took the time to explore their stories. And that's why we should read this book.

_______________________________

Suzanne Jill Levine's acclaimed translations, which include works by Guillermo Cabrera Infante (Three Trapped Tigers) and Manuel Puig (Betrayed by Rita Hayworth), have helped introduce the world to some of the icons of contemporary Latin American literature. She is also editor of Penguin Classics' essays and poetry of Jorge Luis Borges and the author of The Subversive Scribe: Translating Latin American Fiction. She is the winner of PEN USA's Translation Award 2012 for her translation of Jose Donoso's The Lizard's Tale. 


Later. 

• Violence like rape is first of all authoritarian, based on the rapist's premise: I have the right to control you.
• Thus a rapist's chosen victim has no rights or liberties; the rapist has the right to control and punish her.
• Murder-rape is the extreme version of authoritarianism. The murderer asserts he has the right to decide if you live or die, the ultimate control. Even if the victim acts “obedient,” the aggressor's desire to control originates in a rage that obedience can’t assuage. Whatever fears, whatever sense of vulnerability may underlie such violent behavior, rapists assert entitlement to inflict suffering and death on other people. Rape breeds misery in perpetrator and victim.
• Of 62 mass shootings in the U.S. in three decades, only one was committed by a woman. When the press says lone gunman, everyone talks about loners and guns but not about men.
• Men are unaware of all women's intricate ways they stay alert, their limited access to the world, precautions they take, and thoughts about rape that they have all the time.
• Colleges spend more time telling womenhow to survive predators than telling the other half not to be predators.
• 1 out of every 3 Native American women will raped. On reservations, 88%of those are committed by non-Native men that tribal governments can’t prosecute.
• 87,000 rapes occur in this country every year.
• 11% of rapes are committed by fathers or stepfathers.

Liliana Valenzuela reading her poetry

Liliana Valenzuela with fellow author (and mystery writer) Lucha Corpi

Susana Chávez-Silverman

Ramón García

Trebor Healey

Special Guest Columnist: Martín Espada

Arriving just in time for this week's La Bloga-Inaugural Flavored Tuesday, La Bloga friend Martín Espada emails a reading of Espada's Frederick Douglass poem--and an interview--on Moyers and Company, which aired on PBS recently. Martín encourages La Bloga readers to enjoy the work and interview, and pass it around.

La Bloga heartily endorses the notion, infact everything about the poem; indeed, gente, pass it around! Click on one or all of the sharing icons at the top of today's column to email, Twitter, Facebook, or Google this.







Weekend With the Word
Michael Sedano

My first wife and I couldn't pass on the opportunity to hear the LA Philharmonic perform Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. It was a superb bonus that Emanuel Ax would play Mozart's K503 with its inescapable prefiguration of La Marseillaise. I thought the only drawback would be the absence of Dudamel, and the blaring Dutilleux, but I was wrong, that's for sure.

We didn't have our normal Sunday matinée subscription seats overlooking the piano side, and got plunked down among Thursday night tipos who'd had a few bottles of wine with dinner. So they talked and talked loudly. The brassy Shadows of Time opening number masked their chatter, but as conductor Ludovic Morlot launched Mozart, the woman in her cups started chattering. In response, two seats in from my aisle seat, a woman turned and loudly "Shhh'd" the oblivious couple behind me. A few bars into Ax' opening, the shusher launched into delighted chatter of her own. No one shushed her and I kept my eyes on the keyboard, wishing my fingers could read notes as easily as my eyes read text.

But those were the only bad words of the weekend.

Saturday, I joined the Stanford Chicana Chicano Alumni Book Club to discuss Reyna Grande's Critics Circle-nominated memoir, The Distance Between Us, with the author. The group peppered Grande with questions and compliments in an engaging give-and-take that consumed as much time as Reyna could offer. Not only was the author coming down with the current flu bug--on the eve of departing for seven readings in the next three days--she had miles to go and promises to keep.


Reyna had to dash off, reminding me she was headed to Pasadena's sole surviving independent bookstore, Vroman's, for Luis Alberto Urrea's reading of Queen of America. That was news to me, but ni modo. I prevailed on my carpool, Concepción Valadez and Manuel Urrutia, to detour to Vroman's rather than slow down in front of my house to let me open the door and roll to the right as they sped off back to the valley.


Luis Urrea gets into it, engaging his story, his writing, his audience. When a person in the front row raised her cameraphone to take a foto, the device spoke, "Say Cheese." Urrea stopped in mid-sentence amused and astonished, to ask her, "Did your phone just say 'Say Cheese'?"

Now that is adapting to the audience and the setting. It's what audiences deserve, and what they get from a Urrea presentation. If anyone hasn't yet decided to buy the book, this quality of interactivity is certain to move a few more wallets into the Buy column.

Sunday brought the monthly La Palabra reading. Obviously I'm not paying attention to my surroundings. It wasn't until I read Liz Gonzalez' Facebook post that she would be at Avenue 50 Studio in an hour that it hit me I was about to miss another must-see reading and photography opportunity.

Speech, oral performance, is most photogenic when a poet or prose writer, makes the experience  dynamic communication. Two of La Palabra readers practiced that by getting away from the lectern and committing themselves whole body to their audience.

Christine Jordan

Karineh

It's frustrating to an audience, and limiting to the writer. to get stuck behind the lectern. Unless the writer "acts", the reading exacts a toll on attention, creating what McLuhan called a "hot" medium that communicates solely through the ears.