Tag: mexico

Two Poems // Sonya Wohletz

~ South Broadway Press ~ Leave a comment
Image: Antonio Vivace

PROMISE: CHIMAYÓ, NEW MEXICO 2011

BY SONYA WOHLETZ

Six thousand feet familiar; the old land grants—sundered
snow lines. Wherein the altar

rises like a fang above the arroyo.
Mourning shrubs staggering in every direction,

withered veins of pink scree;
the strangled herbs of a long-ago wilderness

that promised the same cure that now
can only serve a cunning and calculated death—

for the drought-stiffened hills,
for the blood chalice leaching, as in an act of betrayal—

ice snaking its delicate throat while the
bone/sprung heart seeps its syrups to the cottonwoods.

And there, divided between the horned moon
and the deciduous cycle of trails,

that shrine waits for her, for us,
for those that labored the acequias,

for those shot down at the approach of Good Friday.
Hundreds of miles of penitents

stringing along the Camino Real
after the image of a dead man,

hanged on the green tree of life,
an ivory tumor above the well

of promises. I curled myself
into its depths, while the peregrine winds

rolled through the ponderosa, the piñón.
And thought it meant

to revive me, though I suffered from
a misuse of suffering that no miracle

could calm. I could only feed;
feed the elements captured in those dense idols.

And I recall the friend that brought some
miracle dirt to my mother when she

could no longer remember the place
where the marriage was celebrated,

where it sustained itself in banquet,
as a union of forms, as promissory anguish,

now writ in the yeso & minerals
upon the bultos of those bad centuries.

I contemplate their
blessed and barren ground, inflicted

inside my yearned-for humility, a plastic bag
near the feet of the plastered virgen,

who presided our home impassively.
Or, perhaps she did doctor us—

scale by slimed scale. Each year of the failed family.
And did her Christ then

slide his death into your skin as you
sank your breath

into the blue night, speaking—no, proclaiming—
(for what I can’t quite name)

in dream, as though recalling the command—
Thief, enter through us.

PROMESA 2: CHIMAYÓ, NEW MEXICO

BY SONYA WOHLETZ

The tree of life rises above the pocito,
wherein the earth—tunneled with strange injury.
I pin a heart to your holy name
and feed my blood, my bandage,
to the green roots of the mountain.
A miracle appendaged—
vision in the cure of wilderness,
its profound herb, grown solitary.

Sonya Wohletz is a writer and poet living in the Pacific Northwest. Her first book of poetry, Bir Sıra Sonra/One Row After, was published by First Matter Press in 2022. Her second book is forthcoming with South Broadway Press.

Sparrow’s Blood | Paul Games

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Image: João Reguengos

Sparrow’s Blood

…Okay, here’s one for you: I’m retiring my last name Gomez for the one my ancestor Eladio brought over to Mexico City from a village in Portugal as a teenage immigrant: Games. Spoken aloud, the names sound similar, but I want my children’s last name to be spelled G-A-M-E-S. Maybe they can sneak past getting mail in Spanish only, and other things that come along with being presumed Latino. Which we don’t really feel. 

…Eladio married a girl in New Mexico named Sparrow. She was reportedly often distracted and melancholy. Eladio was by accounts a young man of enterprising character and found work right away using the identity of a man named Oscar Gomez, recently deceased. Mysterious to me in that Eladio took not only Oscar’s name, but his job and woman as well.

…Eladio had six children with Sparrow, one of whom was my grandfather: Casimiro Gomez. He was the second son. Sparrow loved him dearly, and sometimes she called him Oscar.

…Eladio volunteered to fight in France during the Great War. It’s said he came home shell shocked. He got into the liquor trade when Prohibition kicked off, and moved his family to Los Angeles during the Great Depression for work when Prohibition was canceled. His experience as a war veteran found him a job as a cop and over time he hustled his way to being a vice detective. 

…Casimiro eventually moved to Napa to work as a vineyard farmhand and then off to France to fight Germans because that’s what he was drafted to do. He returned battle fatigued to California, to Oakland, where he started his own family and became a smuggler through Eladio’s connections. He relocated his mother and two sisters to join him. He became the father of seven children himself.

…Sparrow remains in my memory an old woman in a wheelchair on my Aunt Gloria’s porch, distracted and melancholy, the ashes of her Virginia Slims always several inches long. She never learned to speak English and outlived Eladio by decades. Everyone called her Sparrow. 

…The required public announcement for legally changing Gomez to Games was published yesterday for the first time in a local paper, I think. I paid for it. Not cheap. I hope my car doesn’t know. Publishing today and tomorrow will satisfy the terms of the law. I’ll get an affidavit in paper mail stating I satisfied that part of the process and then it’s back to the judge who already approved the change. It should be a done deal soon. 

…I don’t believe my grandfather would think worse of me for it. Sitting at his kitchen table listening to horse races on the radio with his own Pall Mall ashes so long it made me nervous. Sometimes he talked to my father and I about how our family name had once been Games, and that we weren’t Mexican. We were Colombian and Portuguese. His mother Sparrow had been born in Medellín. I’m not sure what my own father would think of the name change, though he does live in Medellín now. 

…Eladio’s name is coming back on the board. I did it for my boy and my girl, and not for the kind of ancestral return I claimed on the application. I know there has been name based prejudice in my life and if I can buy my children’s way out of it, I’ll take the surreal identity shift. Is it a little conformist? And do I think about how my son might someday choose to pronounce G-A-M-E-S in a way that sounds considerably different than Gomez? Yes. Maybe learning the shape of my environment and trying to live in it has been one of survival’s lessons, and that’s part of what I am going through.

I remain, 
Sparrow’s great grandson.

Paul Games loves silk ties, sometimes pop music, and identifies as a Rocker. He is an MFA graduate of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics in Boulder and has been an Adjunct Professor of First Year Writing at Metro in Denver since 2018. His son loves tennis and his daughter loves her friends. His wife tolerates him. His parents are alive. He likes to read thrillers and enjoys long sessions in remarkably hot sauna settings, though not at the same time. He is a Triple Virgo. He is from Oakland, CA.

Two Poems | Richard Oyama

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Image: Max Fuchs

Thrift Shops

What you search for is
an approximation—

musk of old clothes,
utensils sans luster,

broken toys,
nicked plates—

disappearance of the new,
markings-down of the faded,

the distressed but
nothing to be done:

a secondhand life
exacts cost

and reduces value yet you’re
still in the hunt,

a fox burrowing among
burial mounds of apparel,

treadless shoes,
non-brand sports gear,

dubious appliances in
a cast-off world.

Green

Luis’s duckbill shadowed
His eyes. That’s how he
Liked it. He was quiet as a shadow.

When I elicited an answer, his mouth
Twisted into a rictus as though
Words were rudely forced.

It was a code not to be violated, how he
Came up, the homies he hung with. He was
A good-looking kid but thin

And slight. I see him in
Pendleton flannel and jeans. He
Merged into a wall like indios around

Garrulous friends, the cholas more
Butch than the boys. Fernando
His Guatemalan buddy

Drove a senior van, a stand-up dad.
Luis straightened up
And flew right one day then

Disappeared to Phoenix the next. Abigail
Called him a child. Luis
Offered to show me his gun tattoo. I

Forget when it was he told me about
The felony arrest over his head
After he pulled a Glock on a U.S. marshal. It

Wasn’t the drogas he dealt that was
The addiction, Luis said. It was the green.

Richard Oyama’s work has appeared in Premonitions: The Kaya Anthology of New Asian North American Poetry, The Nuyorasian Anthology, Breaking Silence, Dissident Song, A Gift of Tongues, About Place, Konch, Pirene’s Fountain, Malpais Review, Buddhist Poetry Review and other journals. He has a M.A. in English: Creative Writing from San Francisco State University. His first novel in a trilogy, A Riot Goin’ On, is forthcoming.

Progress, Mexico | Dustin King

~ South Broadway Press ~ 1 Comment
Image: Josh Withers

Progress, Mexico

1.

The stray dogs bite. There’s glass in the sand,
too worn to cut a toe. A toddler giggles
running from her family toward the
waves. They urge her back. On the beach
road, I can’t tell if the sound of a car
approaching from behind is the surf until
headlights flash. The gate of the abandoned
school for “incapacitados” is chained shut,
has been for months, sargassum and plastic
washing under. Classroom walls of cracked
concrete. Graffiti on graffiti. A phantom yell
of gringo! Spitting rain. It will pour any minute.
Then it doesn’t. The yacht club sells pizzas
to expats but no one is hungry tonight. Wind
scatters plastic chairs around tables as if
customers were full and anxious to get
home, then as if the patio were raided by
stray dogs. Each palm tree has a personal
hair dryer. The expats, like stray dogs,
growl at newcomers, bark at each other
into the night. The expats feed the stray dogs.
Cheapest alarm system I ever had, says
one to another. A pack gathers in front of
his second home like hyenas, vicious, grinning.
Testicles, teats, purpled, withered fruit clinging
to the vine. They shit where they want. A passerby
steps in it, curses. A passerby kicks out but
we see who is really afraid. A passing car
accelerates, achieves revenge. The corpse
of a stray dog in a ditch stinking until
it won’t anymore. Expats think the pandemic
a hoax or conspiracy initiated by Jews.
The expats are assholes, says an expat, but
they are old. They die quick. One, on his
moto, was run over by a microbus last week.
He exploded like a McDonalds ketchup package.

2.

I speak to a loved one on the phone. She
insists, there is something you’re not telling me.
Twists and flecks of iridium, extraterrestrial
metal, shocked quartz and glass beads discovered
in the rock core. Water-winged children hurling
themselves into cenotes, earth’s empty eye sockets,
prehispanic graveyards, skeletons fished
out from 100 meters deep, bats zig-zagging
over water underground. I’m alone in the
port city of Progreso. Chicxclub, site of
climate disruption, mass extinction, ancient
rerouting of life. A meteor with the power of
1,000 atomic bombs. We won’t give the
universe time for another go. A seagull missing
a foot lands near my dinner, gingerly using the
stump for balance, swaying more than usual in
the breeze. A flamingo limping across a salty lake.
A stray dog hopping. An ex-pat in a wheelchair.
Landmine in Afghanistan. Crowded hovels
with no running water inland. Abandoned
mansions on the coast. Mold, erosion,
dilapidation. A hurricane isn’t at fault.
The money ran out or virus. Crackling bass
and reggaetón and shouts from inside one
shell of a building that isn’t theirs, the
windows boarded up and papered over.
From the terrace three floors up a young
Mexican points to the liter of beer in his hand
and yells, ¡Súbate, Güero! I pass through a door
with a busted lock.

3.
A group of 20-somethings chugging beer
around an empty pool. Racing to
inebriation. Pulling ahead in the race to
elude annihilation. Assembled from various
regions of Mexico, here to construct a suburbia
of sorts outside the port city, an international
village. They pass me a joint, I bum them
English cigarettes too expensive for Mexico.
They push a phone with a PowerPoint
presentation in front of me. Condos with
rooftop gardens, windmills, and solar panels
resembling Mayan pyramids constructed over
the ruins of Mayan pyramids long ago
chewed, swallowed, and still being digested by
jungle. Graphene super metal and recycled
plastics. Bubble tech and defoaming. Optimum
insulation and acoustics, less CO2 release. Jargon,
gospel, babble of sustainability. New lingo for
the industry, the lexicon, the public imagination.
Off the grid. Supposedly free from the control
and corruption of government, of cartels. I say it
sounds like a cult and an interior designer giggles
wiggling her pointer finger up and down, says
sí, sí, como Charley Manson. Voice automated
everything—your entertainment, your coffee
pot, your bidet. All-inclusive. More amenities
promised than a liberal arts college. A Burger
King. Probably a mini-Target. The promise
of consumerism preserved amid the crash
of exterior markets. Top priority: Security.
AK-47s, M-16s, Uzis. Bulletproof vests and
jackets that look like you’re going to church
or brunch. Fences with barbed wire as tall
as border walls. Here in the shell of an ex-expat’s
vacation home the other American dream of
the gated community lifted, romanticized,
enhanced. Ultra-militarized. Elon Musk might
support the project, claims an energy specialist.
Living there will be like working for Google,
boasts the jungle rave DJ. There is opportunity
in crisis, they add. They have acquired the land.
Started construction. Convinced expats to invest,
possibly retire there. I jokingly ask the CEO, Who
will be eaten first when the apocalypse comes?
He nods toward a stray dog eying us from below
and as serious as climate change says,
could be any of us.

Dustin King teaches Spanish and runs a small organization that provides aide to undocumented community in Richmond, Va. His poems appear in Blood and Bourbon, Ligeia, Tilted House, Drunk Monkey and other magazines. He most recently made the longlist in the 2021 UK national poetry competition.

This poem is from South Broadway Press’ new anthology, 
Dwell: Poems About Home. Purchase here.