¿Ves? • On-line Floricanto Mid-Year 2014 • Fútbol Floricanto, Octofinals.

“¿Ves?"

Michael Sedano

"¿Ves?" was an expression my grandmother favored, maybe the entire clan of Villa women favored, to sum up disappointment and what to do about it.

In a single syllable gramma summed up her knowledge that when something was too-good-to-be-true, don’t be surprised to receive a kick in the ass for your trouble.

That’s not fatalistic, it’s flexible pragmatism. “¿Ves?” she’d say with a wave of her hand like waving off a fly. She meant take your licks and move on, there are lots of flies.

I thought of my gramma--and my dad’s stoicism--when I learned the score of the Mexico-Netherlands World Cup game. My dad would take a kitchen chair into the teevee room. His ma would recline on her plastic clad sofa, the San Bernardino Sun on her lap. I'd sit on the floor moaning and screaming at the screen. Mother and son would take in the end of the game calmly, watching Netherlands refuse extreme unction and kick Mexico’s ass for a 2-1 win.

My gramma would look at my dad, my dad would look at my agony, and together they’d explain sports to me. “¿Ves?”

For gramma it was a double "¿ves?" Because she was an indian, born in Pomona, rooting for Mexico would have been a time waster. Then to have them lose after all that? "¿Ves?"

Or, as Roseanne Rossannadanna would later proclaim, “it’s always something,” for Mexico. Our team remains in contention, the US team, that is. It's always something.

Ditto La Bloga.

For La Bloga-Tuesday, the something is cool; a pair of On-line Floricantos. In La Bloga’s continuing fútbol floricanto series, today’s work from Ryan Nance reflects the conjunction of poetry and technology, an ekphrasis of recent broadcasts.

Capping off today’s column, Odilia Galván Rodríguez and her co-moderators of the Facebook group Poets Responding to SB 1070: Poetry of Resistance, nominate six powerful poems from five accomplished poets for our featured monthly On-line Floricanto.

Be sure to check out each poet’s bio at the bottom of the column. While you’re there, look for the Comment icon and share your soccer predictions or miseries, and your responses to our five featured poets.


Fútbol Floricanto Featuring Ryan Nance

XI: Stars
by rtsnance (Ryan Scott Nance)

You, Gyan, see the ball with all of your quantum selves.
You, Villa, meet the motion with mimic motion.
You, Sturridge, build a high carriage against the pale blue heavens.
You, Junior, don’t wait for anything but start your own.
You, Suarez, make a current of hot intent wash through the high canyon of others’ hopes.
You, Dzeko, stack tight in cargo of the unspoken grandeur.
You, Hazard, aren’t fooling many people into thinking you’re earthborn.
You, Robben, everyone knows exactly what you are going to do, but can’t stop it.
You, Messi, mustn’t stop.
You, Klose, will answer our questions we stored up quietly in long train rides and heavy traffic.
You, Drogba, burn gallons of joy on the bonfire of our young hearts.


XI: España v. Nederlands 1-5
by rtsnance (Ryan Scott Nance)

Vast enough to acquire height
The Dutch built their Spanish palisades
With fine optical ground glass
In their cuticles and eyebrows
Repeated motions made motionless
with more intent,
A Blind pass met in swift desirous
Touching. Van Persie lifted off the ground
with pure attention turned into a supplicant’s prayer
With a thousand days of bright effort
We arrange the union of a patch of sun with our radiance


XI: Portugal v. USA Draw 2-2
by rtsnance (Ryan Scott Nance)

First, magnificent that play exists
away from the slow desert of fear
Then, magnificent that the mind learns
in joy the way
cause can lead to cause
After then, the magnificence of light touch,
mastery and talent of playing well
And only then
the magnificence
of win secured
and loss endured.

Ryan Nance is a creative force engaged in diverse activities and venues, from street corners to the technosphere. He currently leads Five Things  I Learned Today.

The Fútbol Floricanto series is curated by Yago S. Cura.


Late-breaking News
Latino Literacy Now Announces The International Latino Book Awards  

Click here for a comprehensive listing of nominees and awards.



On-line Floricanto for Mid-Year 2014
Elizabeth Marino,  Elena Díaz Bjorkquist,  Edward A. Vidaurre,  Sonia Gutiérrez,  Tara Evonne Trudell


ASYLUM
By Elizabeth Marino

Another sleepless night,
and bad television
is still not calming.

My mind has drifted back
to Charlie and his blue
plastic boat, shared at St. Vincent
Orphan Asylum in Chicago.
His hair was wondrously full
and he made my belly laugh
as we waited and drifted.

The dormitory cribs were
far different from the blue vinyl
mats on the concrete floor
of the women’s wing of the
shelter.  Each places of shelter
and transit, an end time
at any time.

And I see these pictures
of the children stacked up like
cord wood, relatively safe
compared to the Pakistani children
stacked up like cord wood
in ox carts, after a drone attack.

It is difficult to shut off
these images on the screen
of the mind’s eye.  The browser sticks,
and keeps refreshing itself.

In the morning
I must go out the door
and decide to be alive.
       


Speak Mexican for Us
By Elena Díaz Bjorkquist

The gringuitas taunt me,
knowing I’d be punished
for speaking my language
on the playground.

Speak Mexican for us.

They don’t understand,
Don’t listen to my explanation:
Spanish, not Mexican.

Spanish is a language,
Mexican is a nationality.
English is a language,
English is a nationality.

Español, the language
of familia y casa,
Español, the language
of comfort and love.

English is cold,
difficult to learn,
Spanish rolls smooth
off my tongue.

Spanish at school
gets me punished.
English at home
gets me scolded.

I learn to speak both,
Spanish at home,
English at school.

Switch from one
to the other, know
when to use either.




Los Desaparecidos
By Edward A. Vidaurre

Everyone has the gift of invisibility,
even the borderwall goes unnoticed in June after a
month that drains us of life. The scent of knives
on a hot summer is the only constant
amongst the news of frontera tragedies and a poetry
reading in a stick-to-your-skin humid bar in a small South Texas town.

We all have the gift of going missing,
like the breath of a collapsing lung,
like a whisper from behind, a shooting star.
Or do we just hide reading a newspaper upside-down
when the new Sheriff arrives?

Puede ser que tambien los periodicos se convierten
lanchas que se lanzan en un rio olvidado, en aguas
color a sangre de tantos que casi por las yemas de los dedos
tocaban tierra Estadounidense.

The missing,
they recite Howl across the Rio Grande
but not the Ginsberg lament for his brethren
but the howls of suffering souls crammed in stash houses
across our children's playgrounds, those left
for dead in sweltering sardine packed vessels,
-those left alive to remember hell is real.

Los desaparecidos,
quieren ser encontrados
aun decapacitados y sin lenguas.

Siguen gritando porque el silencio es fuerte en sufrimiento.

We will keep them alive and find them!

Through art, poetry, music, stories that scare the night,
and lullabies that make our children sleep tight.

Cuando los cantos se vuelven agua
el olor de cuchillos en el aire
bailan con la bungavilla trepadora
descendiendose seis pies bajo la tierra sin nombre
-solo una alabanza que fluje entre la tierra agrietada




El Lugar de los Alebrijes
Por Sonia Gutiérrez

para Sergio Vásquez y Rogelio Casas

Aquí bailaron los alebrijes:
algunos grandes, algunos pequeños,
algún pedorro, y hasta un maldito se coló.

Aquí gozaron los alebrijes:
como pelotas cometas sus colores
brincaron por todo alrededor.

Aquí anduvieron los alebrijes:
pasearon todos juntos dejando huellas
para llegar a Alebrijelandia.

Aquí los amigos de los alebrijes
sonríen al verlos caminar
y jugar todos los días.

Aquí en Alebrijelandia
ningún color es mejor que otro,
y todos los alebrijes irradian por igual.

© 2014 Sonia Gutiérrez

The Place of the Alebrijes
By Sonia Gutiérrez

to Sergio Vásquez and Rogelio Casas

The alebrijes danced here:
some big, some small, a gassy one,
and even a wicked one tagged along.

The alebrijes rejoiced here:
like comet balls their colors
jumped all around.

The alebrijes were here:
they travelled together leaving footprints
to arrive to Alebrijelandia.

Here the friends of the alebrijes
smile to see so them all walk
and play every day.

Here in Alebrijelandia
no color is better than another,
and the alebrijes radiate all the same.

© 2014 Sonia Gutiérrez

Far Away
by Tara Evonne Trudell

crossing
the mojave desert
I dreamed
my people
moving through
heat waves
and hunger pains
mothers fathers
children
willing life
dying to cross
a line
drawn in sand
drones hovering in air
dangerous spy tactics
always monitoring
the calculation
in military moves
real life
hunger war games
forcing survival
the extreme NAFTA
and CIA manipulation
taking land
and killing people
corrupt government
holding meetings
with drug lords
in slick suits
making up
hard core
statistics
to act on
with militarized force
feeding masses
misled lies
laced with hate
turning one side
against
the other
with neither side
existing at all
every day life
selling American
dreaming material
sold by elite thugs
and prison profiteers
in slick suits
making up laws
in corrupt politics
the buddying up
of corporations
filling systems
making a business
out of brown people
handcuffing butterflies
taking away
the freedom
to migrate
caught by ICE
profiling parents
the leaving
left alone
in terrified children
separating families
creating impossible reuniting
the written word
in small print
USA court documents
the taking away
of Mexico
in parental rights
when accusations fly
calling names out
illegal!
alien!
immigrant!
USA labels
of being brown
in a country
too far
to care
when not close
to home
American comfort
family circles tight
the choice
to be unaware
what’s really going down
south of the border
the human race
running away
when excluding
their own
mechanical hummingbird
droning on
the keeping
of government control
gleaming
in big brother eye
the elite
banking on profits
of brown people
crossing
to survive.

Elizabeth Marino is honored to return to LaBloga. Her chapbook, Ceremonies, was released by dancing girl press in 2014. This collection was based on work begun at a residency at Los Dos Brujas Writers Workshops, on the Ghost Ranch, near Albuquerque NM, where she studied with Juan Felipe Herrera. She received a conference scholarship and a CAAP grant.

Her prior chapbook, Debris: Poems and Memoir, is still available through Puddin'head press. She is glad to look back on 21 years in the  university teaching profession.

She is grateful for the folks in her life who lift her up, make her laugh, and keep things lively in Chicago.


Elena Díaz Bjorkquist is a writer and an artist from Tucson, Arizona. She writes about Morenci
 where she was born. Elena is the author of two books, Suffer Smoke and Water from the Moon and co-editor of Sowing the Seeds, una cosecha de recuerdos and Our Spirit, Our Reality; our life experiences in stories and poems, anthologies written in the writers collective Sowing the Seeds.

As an Arizona Humanities Council (AHC) Scholar, Elena has performed as Teresa Urrea in a Chautauqua living history presentation and done presentations about Morenci for thirteen years.
In 2012 she received the Arizona Commission on the Arts Bill Desmond Writing Award for excelling nonfiction writing and the Arizona Humanities Council Dan Schilling Public Humanities Scholar Award in recognition of her work in the humanities.
Elena was nominated for Tucson Poet Laureate in 2012 and was one of the moderators of the Facebook page Poets Responding to SB 1070. Her poems have been published in La Bloga, The Gospel According to Poetry, and The Más Tequilla Review. Elena is also a ceramic artist, specializing in masks and sculpture. She teaches a weekly clay class out of her studio, Casita TzinTzunTzan.

Edward Vidaurre has been been published in several anthologies and literary journals among them La Bloga, Bordersenses, Interstice, La Noria Literary Journal, Boundless Anthology of the Valley International Poetry Festival 2011-2013.

He’s had two books published -I Took My Barrio On A Road Trip (Slough Press 2013) and Insomnia (El Zarape Press 2014.

He also co-edited TWENTY-Poems in Memoriam and Boundless 2014 the Anthology of the Rio Grande Valley International Poetry Festival.

Sonia Gutiérrez is a poet professor who promotes social justice and human dignity. She teaches English Composition and Critical Thinking and Writing at Palomar College.

La Bloga is home to her Poets Responding SB 1070 poems, including “Best Poems 2011” and “Best Poems 2012.”

Her bilingual poetry collection, Spider Woman/La Mujer Araña (Olmeca Press, 2013), is her debut publication.

Kissing Dreams from a Distance, a novel written in the Tomás Rivera and Sandra Cisneros literary tradition, is seeking publication. She is at work on Legacy/Herencia, a poetry collection. To learn more about Sonia, visit SoniaGutierrez.com.

Tara Evonne Trudell studied film, audio, and photography while in college at New Mexico Highlands University. She is a recent graduate with her BFA in Media Arts.

As a poet and mother of four children, raising them to understand her purpose to represent humanity, compassion, and action in all her work is her dedication to raising them with an awareness of their own growing identities.

Incorporating poetry she addresses the many troubling issues that are ongoing in society and hopes that her works will create an emotional impact that inspires others to act.



Golazos or Go Home: Fútbol Floricanto Features Ryan Nance