True Blue

truth

/tro͞oTH/

noun:   the quality or state of being true.

"he had to accept the truth of her accusation"

Similar:

veracity
truthfulness
verity
sincerity
candor 
honesty
genuineness 
gospel

gospel truth

that which is true or in accordance with fact or reality.

noun: the truth

"tell me the truth"

Similar: the fact of the matter
what actually/really happened

As I've gotten older, I realized that the are things I stopped telling people and explaining. I asked some sister writers Elizabeth Marino and Yolanda Nieves to add their two cents. But before you hear from them, here's mine.

After eight years of living at the poverty level, I've finally decided to write about it. Fair warning to readers: if you are looking for poverty porn, move on.  There are enough stories of the desperation, the panic, the self-loathing; as well as the "I found the light inside me after I lost it all." paens.

This won't be about any of that at all. This is about denial and acceptance and what you finally face in yourself.

I am a recovering alcoholic/incest survivor/survivor of domestic violence and death threats. I wrote books, got some of them published, interviewed people like Martin Espada, and read with Juan Felipe Herrera. I went back to school in my late thirties and got a B.A. and an M.F.A. That history, both good and bad, has nothing to do with what I about to say.

I had to face my own powerlessness - over alcohol, over my sexual abuse history, over what I cannot control either within or without me, what casual acquaintances and those I love dearly will do or not no. I have accepted and let go of a million things...

Except for this.

My people are working people, pushing through and working hard always produced some bit of ballast, some piece of rock to stand on, some food on the table.

What I have fought against and am facing is at 63, I might never find another job. Instead of telling myself if I just keep pushing, keep reinventing myself, there will be a place for me right around the corner. I currently have 943 applications on file. I finished a program to be a TEFL instructor, as well as nailing a proofreading certificate. 

And yes, I have applied for jobs ranging from hotel front desk clerk, to Walmart greeter, to executive assistant, to Assistant Professor of English....and nada.

The new normal - I live on my social security, about $1000 a month, and whatever else I can hustle. This where the belief that hard work = improving my life passes away. 

I stopped thinking about next year, or visiting home, or a more comfortable pair of shoes. I stopped planning for the future, watching a shrinking horizon. 

Now l try to eat as well as I can, get enough water, walking and getting some sunshine, and finding one true piece of joy in myself, in my partner, in my day.

At the risk of hyperbole, I fight the wolf, whose teeth are fear, and whose claws can shred your self-respect, if you let down your guard for even a second. 

Gente, I'm tired.

I know there are millions out there like me.

I know there is no social contract to take care of each other, to provide a dignified life and death for anyone in this country. Friends have done so much, giving what they can freely, but that is not the safety net I mean.

What I stopped telling people is I'm sure a break is just around the corner.

Elizabeth Marino

As a self-identified socially engaged poet, one’s personal poverty can be flooded by pity, when you hunger for empathy. A sharp, piercing cry of pain is not the full sound of your humanity, and skimps on what you need to say. The literally starving artist, with unstable housing, lack of access to decent health care, and maybe one hot meal a day is as crushed as anyone missing the essentials for material survival. To choose impoverishment in some wrongheaded attempt to identify with some Other or “lift up the voice of the voiceless” ultimately rings false, and an artist must be free to get to one’s own truth of their own conditions. To be of use in the world demands such truthfulness.

I have survived through connection and solitude.  One cannot take the hand of opportunity when one’s own hand is trembling and faltering.  But one can rest and rise again. Keep holding onto your drive to communicate when much is expressed, as well as to those drafts which help move you along your journey, but do not need to be revealed to others. Delirium might be trippy, but not really nourishing.


One victory for those of us of color is that with the existence of projects like LaBloga, our voices are still here, telling our stories in our own ways. If we truly lack resilience and persistence, why are there volumes of our work, and more in production? If we do not craft our work properly, why are our audiences so moved, and our lines shared among our listeners? Know that there are people who in the name of diversity relish the pornography of our pain more than the tapestry of our living struggle. Keep moving. Keep working.


Yolanda Nieves

I have stopped sharing the story of how I grew up with an alcoholic father and am considered an Adult Child of an Alcoholic (ACOA). I am a survivor of a father who was a benign alcoholic (he’s dead now) and a mother who wrote herself into government history by applying and receiving welfare.  I was 9 years old when my father decided he didn’t want to live with us. That began the moment of my greatest shame-paying for grocery with food stamps and realizing my mom, infant sister, and I were going to be immigrants in the land called “abandonment.”

It’s terribly exhausting to keep labeling yourself an ACOA when your father’s been dead over a decade, your mother has found peace with all the decisions she made (like staying married to a damaged human being), and you’ve been through several of years of therapy to figure out you have actually been a decent person all of your life and it was “not your fault.”

I want to address what a “benign” alcoholic means to me.  My dad wasn’t interested in anything except drinking.  Liquor was the root chakra force that illuminated his world. The bottle was his wife and mistress at the same time.  My mom, sister, and I were just the afternoon matinee ticket holders who had to watch a bad movie where the hero is on a one-way trip to hell. He spent all his money on booze, forgetting that he had to pay bills and get groceries for us.  Yeah, we were hungry some days.  But he gave us provisional alms once in a while.

I suppose he was one of those periodic alcoholics.  He would stop drinking occasionally long enough to come up for air and say, “I’m sorry.”  My father was not physically or sexually abusive to my mother, me, or my sister.  He was, however, an expert in the area of neglect. He loved dogs and devoted a significant amount of love and time to the dogs we somehow adopted when he wasn’t drunk, which is weird because we were the human beings in need desperate need of his time and attention. (My connection with animals comes from the ying yang love/neglect our dogs suffered.)  

When he wasn’t drinking, my father would drop everything to help his neighbors.  I remember he was attentive to me in this manner: He bought me books. He took me to the zoo, the garden conservatory, amusement parks, and the movies.  When I was 8, he bought me a dictionary as a birthday present and gave me direct instructions. “Read it.”  And like Malcolm X I started with “aardvark” and ended with “zymurgy”.  

So now you understand. It’s complicated, but I have decided to uncomplicate it.  As a witness to my dad’s chronic disease, the memories of his ocean-like drinking episodes are still as awful, dark, and traumatizing as the moments they happened. Yet it is possible that I had an idyllic childhood in comparison to other children whose parent(s) have suffered addiction.  I still am an ACOA, but it’s not worth mentioning anymore.  I had it good.  That’s my story.  I’m sticking to it