Awards Celebration and Writing Workshop
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| 29th Annual Awards Issue |
Crossing Borders
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Zara Raab
Two Crops
Along with the tar weed
sticking to the ox’s rump,
the Branscombes traveled
north toward the Lost Coast
from the Mayacamas.
They took hold in the land,
its folds and creases
rumpled as a man’s shirt
laundered in rain water
and dried in the sun.
They stayed a hundred years.
With the grass that traveled
with them taking root
in the fields, their kids fed
the goats, bedded the hens.
This spring, the one crop
reseeded once more in
the good Branscombe soil.
The other’s plowed deep
under the graveyard
weeded now by goats
gone wild, under the oaks
where four hens are brooding.
Pancho Nácar
Xandú’ Yaa
Cayaca xandú’ yaa stiu’ yanadxí,
Stubelu’cha’ zuba ndaani’ yoo;
Neca zitu ra ba’ napa’ lii,
Chupa xquíri’lu’ caguí lu bidó’.
Nandxó’ ñanda ñune’ lii xandú yaa,
Pa ñaca ndaani’ xquidxe’ nibeza’;
Dunabé huaxa naná rácani naa
Ti zitu nuaa ne xquidxi binni nabeza’.
Pa ñuaa’ ndaani’ xquidxe’ nugaanda’ biyé,
Nicaa’ bichiisa nuzuchaahui’ ndaani’ yoo;
Guirá’ cuananaxhi ña’ta’ lu bidó,
Ñaazi’ gueza, nisa dxu’ni’ nudiee’.
Guirá huna huiini’ nidxiña ñacané,
Ca ni bidxaagu’ nidxiña nudii ná’;
Sica ti yoo, ra cayuutu’ binni dé
Nihuinni ra yoo, casaca xandú’ yaa.
First Offering
Today is the first visit from your soul;
though I am here in this house, you
are in a distant tomb; in memory
of you, I light two candles to the saints.
I would set a great offering
in your memory if I lived in my pueblo;
how it aches in these moments to be
alone, to live in a foreign land.
If I were in my pueblo, I would raise an altar,
and with sacred palm leaves, sew stars
to adorn the walls, and I would set fruit
and tobacco on the sacred table, and offer liquor.
And the women, they would come and help;
those who were your friends would offer their hands;
as in a home where there is corn to be ground you would see
how we devoutly prepare this first offering for your soul.
Translated from the Zapotec by Anthony Seidman
Shelley Ettinger
from All the Ashleys in the World
She doesn’t remember her father—well how could she since she was only a cluster of cells in her mother’s womb at the time? Her mother didn’t even know she was pregnant yet, she’s told Ashley, she wouldn’t figure that out till another couple weeks had passed and her period had not arrived. “Do you think I would have taken that risk if I knew I was carrying you?” This was what her mother said some of the times she told the story. Other times she said, “We risked everything, your Papi and me, to make sure you’d have a better life, you’d be born here, a citizen, safe and free.”
Ashley’s seventh-grade English teacher, Ms. Bernfeld, recently spent one full class session on the uses of irony as a literary device. Too bad no one will ever write a book about Ashley’s family. Irony to spare there. Safe and free, Mami? Ya think?
Her father didn’t have a better life here. No life at all. He made it across the border, sure, then the turn west across the river, but he didn’t last even one full day after that. Their little group of crossers had split up once they waded out of the water, once they walked some more, their clothes drying in the searing heat, spirits cautiously lifting, small smiles to acknowledge that they’d managed the initial hurdles, bottled water to slake their spiking thirst. The land, scattered with sparse bristly sagebrush offering no shade, had held itself flat for a long time, until it started to rise, slightly first then more steeply, a series of uneven undulations warning of the mountainous terrain to come. There was little talk. They saved their breath for the climb, for stepping over cracks in the parched earth, trying not to let piles of pebbles or sudden clumps of tumbleweed trip them up. They walked quickly but carefully, watching for rattlesnakes on the ground, cougars crouched on cliffs. Soon they were wet again, sweat gluing shirts and pants to their chests and butts. Each grateful to have worn a hat, but still they felt the skin on their faces tightening under the desert sun like charred meat on a spit. When they reached the first of the caves—more like cubbyholes, dimples in the ankles of granite giants—they crammed in. They rested briefly, squatting, the roof too low for anyone to stand erect. They breathed the cool clay air layered with the ammoniac stench of bat guano. A few briefly closed their eyes. Then the coyote, whose utterances had thus far been limited to grunts accompanying head nods to point the way, told everyone to listen to what he had to say. Señor Estes, his name was, or at least, Ashley’s mother has said, this is what they knew him as. He was older than most of his charges, in his forties probably, deep furrows on his forehead and cheeks, a hard squint, his mien marked by many years skulking through this cracked, craggy wilderness.
He told them they must split up. They had clung close until now. A dozen, together tamping down the terror pumping through each as they tramped onward those first hours, ever farther from home. Now Señor Estes divided them into three. Smaller units, less detectable, and lighter on their feet. If they kept moving in this big cluster the miles ahead would break them, he said. They might every single one be caught and sent back. On the other hand, if they encountered Migra agents, or bands of roving drunken vigilantes, which would become more likely the further they progressed, he said, four could scatter and each have a chance of escape, Gracias a Dios. They might not all make it but most would.
Leticia Luna
Semilla
A doña Francisca Rojas
Vengo del canto del colibrí
de la sangre olorosa de volcán
canta el arriero a su paso con las bestias
Las vías del tren
los días fríos de Tlaxcala
con los volcanes taciturnos e impecables
Soy un camino de oyameles
una gota de tiempo
un grito perdido en el maguey
un aliento de yegua en brama
Nostalgia de la lluvia
de las flores la estación
y las lágrimas del sauce
Seed
for Doña Francisca Rojas
I come from the hummingbird’s song
from the volcano’s sweet-smelling blood
the skinner sings as he drives his mules
Train tracks
cold days in Tlaxcala
with faultless, silent volcanoes
I’m a path of oyamels
a drop of time
a lost cry in the maguey
a breath of a mare in heat
Nostalgia for the rain
for the flowers the station
and the willow’s tears
Translated from the Spanish by Toshiya Kamei
Kara Candito
Hello from the Hills of Oaxaca
Where is the Duende? Through the empty arch enters
a mental air blowing insistently over the heads of the dead,
seeking new landscapes and unfamiliar accents; an air bearing
the odor of child's spittle, crushed grass, and the veil of Medusa
announcing the unending baptism of all newly-created things.
—Lorca
I.
You taught me to remember this tide
of chicken feathers rising around
the windshield, falling back like a veil
and the hills in this half-light, women
lifting maguey skirts, pulling off cloud-masks;
their faces a flash of foam on a cup of cacao—
that beauty begins with a grease fire in
the eyes. Like dragonflies, we marry
the light. We injure ourselves, instinctively.
I study the codices in the museum—
the foreheads of Olmec infants flattened
with boards at birth, the obsidian prongs
widows used to pull out their own tongues;
their wailing an affect I can only imagine,
faith that one day the beloved will return
like a secretive snake in new skin.
II.
You taught me that we are afraid
most of the time to say our names,
to name the thing that’s missing. I want
to crush this spine of stars tonight,
knowing that all life is being released
out there beyond the fractured cars
and the half-lives of houses; the apologies
and flea-bitten dogs. Out there
in the ancient murky dark—
a corkscrew opening on the bright, bleak
smell of copal and the rosary’s Latin hiss,
like an engine that refuses to turn over.
Elena Poniatowska
from The Canaries
The most important thing is the cage, two yellow terrors inside, two fears at my mercy to add to the ones I already carry inside. They breathe with me, they see, listen, I’m certain they listen because when I put on a record, they stretch their necks, alert. In the morning, you have to uncover them quickly, clean their cage, change their water, replace their earthly nourishment. Then the grass must be stored in a big bowl of water, like watercress, if not, it dries out; the birdseed, the minute bowls, the little round splinterless stick shaped like a perch that they stand on, the banana, the apple, whatever I have on hand. No one’s ever given me a stick I can rest my fears on.
They tremble their yellow trembling, they move their little heads this way and that; standing in front of them I must be an immense mass that blocks the sun, an opaque gelatin, a semolina flan to feed a giant, someone who occupies a disproportionate amount of space that doesn’t belong to her. They make me hate my big round bear-like shadow that terrorizes.
The cage is what’s heavy, they’re so light, they have eyes of nothing, jumping birdseed, a micron of black matter and, nevertheless, they throw looks like darts. I shouldn’t let them intimidate me.
They’re perceptive; they turn their heads before I can turn my greasy human head, my white face that hangs on a butcher’s shop hook since they arrived. I try not to think about them. Yesterday they weren’t part of my daily grind, today I can pretend that I’m still free, but the cage is there.
The first night, I covered it with a towel and hung it next to the enormous wooden seagull that has to be dusted because we all forget to make it fly. The second night, I looked for another spot. The cat lies in wait, he tenses his body, stretches his neck, his body stays rigid like a wire all day, his nature frustrated to the tip of each of his black hairs. I run him off. He returns. I run him off again. He doesn’t understand. I no longer have patience for those who don’t understand.
The second night, I pick my bathroom, it’s safer. It has a good door. At sundown, I cover them and they huddle together in a ball of feathers. When it gets dark, I can’t go into the bathroom because if I turn on the light I’ll interrupt their sleep. What must they think about the immense mass that brushes her teeth to the thunder of pipes? What must they think about the roar of water from the last flush of the toilet? What must they think about the pajamas I’ve been wearing for three days, ridiculously pink and oversized, with blue patches? I must look like the glittery felt dashboard of a taxi to them. And now, what do I do? Dear God, it’s awful being a man. Or a woman. Human, whatever. Occupying so much space. A thousand times more than they do. I sleep uneasy: every once in a while I get up and I slide my hand through a crack beneath the towel to make sure they’re still in there huddled together in a feathery ball, their heads nestled inside their shoulders. Unlike me, they sleep embraced, like lovers.
Translated from the Spanish by George Henson
Felicia R. Martinez
from A story red with dawn
I know a story you must know.
I will tell it as I learned it
but if you listen
you can hear them
telling in the blackberry
around the taco truck
at the crook-legged table
of a one-room apartment
they are telling a story.
It is a story that we
need to hear.
i.
In San Martin Peras
I recognize seven-thirty a.m.
by the way the sun slivers
through the thatched roof.
Popocatepetl sits not as volcano
but as shadow on dawn’s horizon
a faraway mountain haloed with ash
cradled by the cornfield’s whisper.
Children lead me these mornings
on their walk to school as Josefina
drills me on my daily lesson
tskiva means butterfly
tchina means dog
ita means flower
inshishi’ni for hair
In the yard boys in government issued
navy blue sweatshirts call out Gusikye!
inviting me to basketball while girls
collect fistfuls of pollywogs to give me.
After school I visit Reyna who shifts
baby Fidel from one breast to the other
as I help her decipher picture books
ca-sa ga-to ga-llo
For dinner the family shares a can of beans
and yellow ears from behind the house
that Cecilia turns on the fire.
On the day fever keeps me
in bed past noon Marcelina
brings me warm tea in a jícara
as Florencio twines his fingers in my hair
making a waterfall of my spine.
Emilio and Celestino guide me
by both my hands when I head
down a trail-less slope
to where guavas grow lonely
by the river.
Andrés Ramírez
Tao de mí
Vamos a no entender nada
de lo que aquí sucede
a pedirle al sentido que regrese
por donde vino
y como llegó:
de la nada de ningún dios
a insinuar, no a decir
que nada tiene hondura
nada tiene precio
más alto
que subir
subir
para ver lo invisible.
My Tao
Let’s understand nothing
of what’s going on here
let’s ask meaning to go back
where it came from
the way it came:
from the nothingness of no god
let’s insinuate but not say
that nothing has depth
nothing has a higher price
than rising
and rising
to see
what can’t be seen.
Translated from Spanish by Dan Bellm