New Poem November 2011

Found Poem: Newspapers Report on Anti- Immigration Laws, October 2011

Vanishing from school.

Their lives taken.

Hands toiling above dark chocolate soil.

Withdrawn from Shelby, Alabama,

Maricopa, Arizona,

Ogden, Utah.

There are no precise numbers.

But there is anxiety

driving while fear goes shopping.

Tough luck. A judge ruled.

Citizenship documents.

How many Mexicans does it take to screw in a light bulb?

Agua Santa Potrerillos, Michoacan.

San Jeromino Solola, Oaxaca.

Los pueblos

donde abuelita nacío

y los nietos corren detras.

The children left behind.

On rain-fed corn farms

small plots tilled

and beans, pumpkins rise
to a near empty village.

Pobresa y pobreza extrema.

Tantos necesitan.

Tortillas. Workers.

Knives exposed. Clean shear blades.

To stand for hours in hair netting.

Statistics compiled. Midwestern

poultry plants. Russellville.

Crossville. Cullman.

Rest assured the law may lead to arrests.

Only five workers showed up on Thursday.

In an all-white town.

She met a Hispanic mother.

“Yes,” was the only condition.

Anonymity the result.

Poem Jan 2011

Untranslatable Taste

La comelóna smells the warm dreamy plate of rice,

beans, and chicken braised in tomato sauce knowing

that taste buds are wired straight to the dopamine

connections in the brain, the same spot where nicotine

dances, morphine sings, and cocaine crackles a hearty

howl. This is not gluttony or hunger. This is love on a plate.

The taste, the flavor, a zest for life. El gusto. Gusto

for life and language. Sometimes there is only one

way to say how we savor hands rolling masa into dough,

how the dough rounds into tortillas, how the tortillas puff

when ready. It is labor, the work done to survive, a job

accomplished so that we can step outside and praise

the sun caught pink in a strip of ethereal clouds. She is as

Spanish dictates. A nomenclature. A guilt free gourmand.

La comelóna picks up the fork as cheese strings itself

tight. When full with love, neurons fire over synapses.

On April 22nd, 2010, Emelia Guzman’s brain irradiated

and glowed through an MRI scan. First, she scanned

pictures of sex, then of the Virgin Mary, finally

she took in that mouthful and a rainbow of lights

cascaded through her frontal lobe. She swore an Angel

descended offering her marigolds, orchids, and pearls.