Three Poems by Emma Trelles, SB Poet Laureate 2021

   

Emma Trelles

The city of Santa Barbara has appointed its first Latinx Poet Laureate, Emma Trelles. Born in Miami, she is the daughter of Cuban immigrants and now calls Santa Barbara home, where she teaches at the City College. Enjoy three poems by Emma Trelles. Read all about Emma and her plans in the Santa Barbara Independent.

Sonnet for Mark

by Emma Trelles

Now wakes a path between the oaks, now

falls a spell of dove and frog, and stones

dream of their mountain clans and each stick

breaks to hear its name. Now light edges creek

and water appears as a quick coin trick or 

silk pulled from a funnel of months, now

behind us, at last, and shade and sky fill

the mirror moving from next to next. Now

do you see there is no stillness to this world?

Even in sleep a seed is knitting its breach 

from the dark and the body hums 

on the march to becoming less and right

now, words depart then arrive, like a brush

returning to a well of color.

                                                                                            Published in Spillway and Verse Daily

Fable of Frogs

by Emma Trelles

We were all dozing and floating in the night waters of the Redlands, where stars bent light to the ground as if they were still new. 

We were plain and cold to the touch, and we liked it that way.

Routine was our god and so were the winged beads we snapped into our mouths with the speed of pink lightning. We were long years past wishing for what we wanted. We ate and crapped and loved and slept. One evening, there was more.

The dark room of the pond shivered and crickets ceased their one-note demands and knives of sawgrass shook with longing. We began to levitate.

Up into the indigo we opened each juicy eye with care and looked beneath at the peat, at crows smudged on wires that chain words together and roofs like two hands pressed in supplication and signs the color of summer hissing three-thousand promises.

Then, higher, sailing on the heart-shaped rafts that once kept us pinned to what we knew, and were now a promise we were not finished yet.

Below us were children killing minutes, or tracking lilac moths in the hedges, and dogs with little use for flying frogs, and the cats who noticed us and kept silent, as always. We passed over farms and mist and the worn skin of cities, the poisoned land still hanging on.

Some of us dropped into towns where we lived in peace or fell with the rain and disappeared down grates into the kingdoms of refuse and silence.

Some died on the tarmac by the motion that never ceases over this earth. A few slipped away into the broken choirs heard at night, somewhere, beyond sight and even knowing what a thing is despite all the times its voice is heard.

Another way this ends is two of us together, in the farthest away, where the light is hazed and the salt-stripped grasses keep singing, yes, there is life between cliffs and stones huddled in the small and grand forests.

Who knew flight could peel the verve right from you? Or that the crescent moon could find you home, and maybe there is hope anywhere you go, if you take it with you through the cloud of years, it must be carried, it must be carried.

Published in the Miami Rail

The nearest way

by Emma Trelles

Would I consume what I really wanted

only nothing would be left. I am many pigments 

maybe you should figure them out, I’m spent from shining

except when I depart, then my antelope heart sends me 

north to the high lands, where I glow unseen among the pines.

Published in the South Florida Poetry Journal and Salt

Live from the Core: Poetry and Wine tasting in Orcutt

Melinda Palacio

Library Wines before the reading.

In a strange twists of hits and misses, I ended up reading at CORE Winery in Orcutt.

When my poetry pal, Gina Ferrara, asked me to read for her, I did not hesitate to say yes. I have to admit I was a little disappointment she wouldn't be traveling from New Orleans to California to read from her new book, Fitting the Sixth Finger,  poems inspired by the paintings of Marc Chagall. Gina has promised to return next year.

Gina first met Michael McLaughlin, the poet and coordinator of the Live from the CORE Poetry Series in California. He was so taken by Ferarra's reading at the Mission Poetry Series that he asked her to read in Orcutt. I was more than happy to host my good friend. McLaughlin also read at the Maple Leaf Bar on the day when I was in New Orleans, but reading in a different part of town. Most people had assumed we knew each other because he is based in Santa Maria, a town forty minutes from Santa Barbara; we had never met. However, contrary to popular belief, I do not know every poet in California, although I'm working on it.

Reading at CORE Winery was fun.

While Los Angeles is filled with more poetry events than an eager fan can attend, the little town of Orcutt, holds one poetry reading at the CORE Winery once a month. The series is now in its second year and has a strong following and includes an impressive core group who sign up for its open mike. The reading series featured several La Bloga friends, including Luivette Resto, and Emma Trelles, who will read next Saturday, June 10, along with San Luis Obispo poets Jim Cushing and Celeste Goyer at CORE Winery Tasting Room, 105 W. Clark Ave, Old Orcutt, CA 93455. If you're still scratching your head about where Orcutt might be, it's 75 miles north of Santa Barbara. The drive is gorgeous. Orcutt is one of those one street towns. There's a main drag with everything from a hardware store to a winery to an Italian restaurant that serves handmade pasta.

Signing books after the reading

I was most impressed with the CORE Family, Becky and Dave Corey, who open up their tasting room to poetry once a month and the generous audience who listened attentively, bought copies of my book, and shared their own excellent poems during the open mike. What more could a poet desire? Many thanks to Michael McLaughlin for the reading opportunity. I had the pleasure of testing out some new work from my upcoming poetry book, Bird Forgiveness (forthcoming from 3: a Taos Press), and reading with Bay Area poet Mark Fabionar, who recited his first poem at the age of five at a Filipino community center in Stockton.

Mark Fabionar 

I'm looking forward to hearing more poetry at CORE next week. Come and join me and listen to Emma Trelles and new poet friends from San Luis Obispo  June 10.

On Cuba: 12 Notes at the Crossroads

 Guest Post by Emma Trelles

Le sombre Malembo, Dieu du carrefour, 1943, by Wifredo Lam

1. After an entire lifetime in South Florida, I now live 3,000 miles away on the central coast of California, in a small city ringed by mountains and bordered by a Pacific which appears paler and vaster than the Caribbean-Atlantic I have always known. This is where I hear that the Cuban embargo is unraveling, the news a fragment floating from my car radio right before I turn off the ignition to trundle groceries from the trunk to our garden apartment. The U.S. will further ease travel restrictions to the island, open an embassy, lift some trade and banking sanctions.  It is as if a mythic bird has winged overhead and I’ve only caught a glimpse of a few bright feathers. My first thought is what was that? It doesn’t really register. 

2.  I get busy putting away eggs and carrots grown at nearby farms. But the news keeps simmering somewhere inside me, a place as intrinsic to me as my ardor for lists or the invisible work of my lungs. It is the tiny island of Cubania I have carried within me since I was a child, born in the U.S. and trying to belong in Miami, a city that, in the 70s, still viewed my Cuban family and so many other recent immigrants as outsiders, no matter how quickly we learned English and how hard we worked. 

3. As a young girl, I saw Fidel Castro as the camouflaged villain standing between the rotary phone in our kitchen and my family in Havana, whom we could only talk to briefly and on rare occasion. I’d shout in Spanish over the crackle of lines and wonder what their faces looked like. We didn’t have any pictures of them. When I eavesdropped on talk of Castro’s demise, a long-cherished topic in Miami, I imagined a scene much like the one in the The Wizard of Oz, where an oppressor is felled with one crashing stroke. Everyone is giddy and sings in three-part harmonies. A land returns to color, and instead of shoes, two black boots would curl and crumble to dust.

4. I think about this part of my childhood when I think of Cubans on the true island-nation, who, like we once did, have begun their own migration from perceived outcasts to rightful neighbors, with whom we share bloodlines and friendships and a percussive, slangy Spanish. I'm not talking about those who created a palm-fringed prison of the body and its free will. I mean the everyday Cubans who have kept on keeping on. Their relentless optimism and resourcefulness are at the core of Cubanía, something that is also seen in the micro, self-written psalm of my people: Todo se resuelve. Everything will work out.

5. In my imagined island of Cubanía, there is a little boat anchored near the shore and a blue-striped cabana on the beach. It contains a crazy-quilt of culture:

*café con leche, large, and a reservoir of pastelitos de guayaba; 

*homespun altars to Changó (whose Cuban-Catholic twin is Santa Barbara - at left) and La Caridad del Cobre (Cuba's patron saint);

* a garden of white roses and un hombre sincero (first known as José Martí);

*dichos in Spanish like eso es un arroz con mango (Literal meaning: This is a plate of rice and mango. True meaning: What a mess) and tienes que echar pa'lante (Literally: You must move forward. Truly: Never give up); 

*every song Celia Cruz has ever sung with La Sonora Matancera and the Fania All Stars and all the solo stuff, especially that little snippet of a sound check where she’s in Zaire with Fania and busts out la “Guantaramera” in that magma-from-the-earth’s-core timbre of hers and then starts dancing, gliding away from the mic as if caught in the happiest of dreams.

* Wifredo Lam’s oil on canvas, Le sombre Malembo, Dieu du carrefour / Dark Malembo, God of the Crossroads.

*my mother's voice, which can sound like a chime or a siren, depending on the topic of conversation (Chime: I am so proud of you, mima. Siren: Please don't talk to me about Obama).

6. My mother, a Cuban-born American, is intensely Republican, and I am an American-born Cuban and a progressive. When our president won his second term, my mother told my brother she couldn't talk to me for a few days because she didn't want to hear me gloat and because she couldn't bear to see this country go down the same socialist-communist road that Cuba had traveled for more than five decades. My mother confiding to my brother, who passes it along to me, all of this over the phone, because, in my family, a conversation so intimate is unbearable to hold in person. Another Cubanía: Do not confront a person you love with your truthful unpleasantries but freely discuss with others, who will then share them on your behalf.

7. The god of the crossroads stands in a brilliant thicket of green. In my favorite painting by Wifredo Lam, the Afro-Cuban modernist, the deity also known as Elegua in the Santería faith spreads his cloak around a host of horned heads and leaves, an assembly of watchful eyes.

8.  My friends and I, or at least those of us excited by the news, have burned up our phones and laptops with Cuba jabber: articles and songs and old photographs posted and shared; written responses on blogs and magazines; talk of how it all arrived on the 17^th, the feast day of Babalú Ayé, the Santería counterpart to San Lázaro, the Spanish-Catholic saint of healing.  We parsed the president’s speech and how, in what my friend Dan Vera called “a baller move,” Obama quoted José Martí,  the 19^th-century poet-journalist-activist who fought hard to liberate Cubans from Spanish rule and whose words are often invoked by both island communists and exiles as a tribute to independence.  “Liberty is the right for every man to be honest,” said Martí, “to think and speak without hypocrisy.”

9. I have spoken to my mother about Christmas plans and presents, what time we will Skype. We have not discussed Cuba yet. It might take years. We are both the Great Avoiders and neither one of us wants to tear into this ticking box because we love each other more than we revile one another’s politics. And while I have found many of her other stances infuriating, I can only feel a kind of protectiveness towards her now, towards all exiles who are pro-embargo. After living in our community for so long, I understand what is at stake for my mother, for so many. They are losing everything all over again. To them, normalizing relations with the Cuban government means the Castros not only stole all they loved — they finally got away with it.  

10. Because I am a poet, and thus, a hoarder of images, I kept a notebook that catalogued the details of my farewells before I moved to Santa Barbara from South Florida: the ibis that flashed white while they flew by our windows each dusk, how my brother rocks forward when he’s laughing hard, friends cooking dinner or playing guitars. It felt important to write down what would no longer be in short reach, but I was hardly engulfed in sorrow. How would I feel if I knew I might not see any of it again? What do I know about that kind of heartbreak? Not much.  

11.  Empirical fact: There is no one as patriotic as an immigrant-turned-citizen. When I visited Miami in

photo by Charles Trainor, Miami Herald

November, I overheard two Latinas at the car rental discussing plumbing problems. In Spanish and English, they shrugged it off and noted how in this country, that kind of thing was easy to resolver. Both nodded their heads in unison and shared a mmmmm-hhhmm. Subtext: The U.S. rules. In South Florida, Cubans, Haitians, Dominicans, and Venezuelans fly their American flags right alongside the flags of their birthplace, staked on the porches of their homes or flapping from their cars. Their chit-chat is an intricate brocade of English and their first tongue, often in the same sentence, their meals a patchwork of, say, barbecue hamburgers served up with yucca and the ubiquitous rice and beans. In July, my mother texted all of her friends and family to celebrate the anniversary of her arrival to this country. “52 years in the good ole USA,” she tapped. “The best country in the world.” I’ve heard the latter six words from so many immigrants; I’ve lost count.   

12.  Perhaps assimilation, in its realest sense, is not an obliteration of the past, but the making of a new kind of space, one that holds what “was” in the same open hands with what “is.”  At 14medio, an independent online daily launched in Cuba, dissident and writer Yoani Sanchez reported Cubans blowing kisses at President Obama when his announcement was televised in Havana. “Now and again the cry of “I LOVE…” (in English!) could be heard from around the corner.” Are these the beginnings of Cubans and exiles stitching a new embroidery, a cautious piecing together of here and there, them and us, what happened with what we all might become? After half a century that also feels like the quick flick of a wand, I am hopeful. We are moving towards one another again. 

***Emma Trelles is the winner of the 2011 Andres Montoya Poetry Prize. She lives in Santa Barbara. This essay was previously published in the Best American Poetry Blog, December 2014.

Shaking Up the Poetry Scene in Santa Barbara

Melinda Palacio

Emma Trelles, Mission Poetry Series Director

Emma Trelles is taking over the Mission Poetry Series in Santa Barbara. The Florida native is immersing herself in all things California, not just poetry. Last weekend, she volunteered with the Santa Barbara County coastal cleanup and helped collect 3,864 pounds of trash on the beach and 831 pounds of recyclable materials.

She sat down with La Bloga and discussed some of the exciting changes at the Mission Poetry Series. The series has always been a favorite of poetry enthusiasts in Santa Barbara and beyond. The poetry is always exceptional (disclaimer I am reading with Blas Falconer and Michelle Detorie this season; Emma herself read last year), and the series is generous with free refreshments and broadsides for the audience.

Emma Trelles is the 2011 winner of the Andrès Montoya Poetry Prize for her book, Tropicalia (University of Notre Dame Press) and the author of Little Spells.

Tropicalia by Emma Trelles 

La Bloga: 
How did you get involved with the Mission Poetry Series?

Emma Trelles:

I first read at the Mission Poetry Series in the fall of 2013 and hit it off with the series' co-founder and director at the time, Paul Fericano. He's a lovely and intelligent person, as well as a talented poet, who really cares about bringing quality poetry to the community. But he was moving full time to San Francisco and wasn't going to be able to continue directing the series from there, so he asked me to take over. 

Paul Fericano, co-founder and former director of the Mission Poetry Series

La Bloga:
Can you tell us a little bit about your poetry and how being in Santa Barbara has influenced your work?


Emma Trelles:
Moving to Santa Barbara was, in some ways, a huge change for me, particularly since I had lived in South Florida my entire life. Since "place" is a subject I've often addressed in my poems, I definitely see SB seeping into my lines now, mostly in subtle ways that have to do with its eco-systems and how they can be examined through the lens of myth and culture. While in Florida, for example, water was prominent in my poems and even my dreams. Here, its absence is now finding its way into my consciousness as well as my creative work. I never thought I'd say this, but I actually miss those muggy afternoon monsoons that would just pour down and wash the world clean. South Florida has some glorious rain...

Sister Susan Blomstad, Co-founder of the Mission Poetry Series

La Bloga:
The Mission Poetry Series began at the Mission, but has changed venues. Will you rename the series?

Emma Trelles:

I'd like to keep the series name intact to honor the place of its birth, the historic Old Mission in SB, and to recognize the hard work its founders Paul Fericano and Sister Susan Blomstad did in establishing it as a valued and respected reading. The Mission is one of SB's historic jewels and I love that the series reflects that in its own way.

Mission Santa Barbara

La Bloga:

Tell us about what you will maintain and the changes forthcoming in the Mission Poetry Series.

Emma Trelles:

I want the series to maintain the spirit of inclusiveness that Paul cultivated so well, as well as his attention to bringing poets of diverse backgrounds and ages in to read. I'd like to further develop that by including more Latino poets, especially because SB and its surrounding regions are so rich with Latino culture and talent. I'm also exploring how to add additional programming that would further serve greater Santa Barbara by connecting it with poetry through volunteer work, workshops, and more. It's all in the preliminary stages now, but stay tuned for more later this year, when MPS will likely announce on our Facebook page what we're up to!

Mission Poetry Series, Saturday September 27, 1pm

PINTURA: PALABRA – A Report from the Front Lines.

Guest Post by Emma Trelles

A couple of weeks ago, I kissed and made up with my long-time inamorata – poetry. Perhaps Washington DC in mid-February seems a cold place to rekindle the flush of an old love, but this snow-painted city was home-base for “PINTURA:PALABRA, a project in ekphrasis,” and I was invited to attend. Launched by Letras Latinas, the literary program of the Institute for Latino Studies at the University of Notre Dame, PINTURA/PALABRA assembled 13 poets from DC and around the country for a master ekphrastic workshop and a chance to view & write poem-drafts about “Our America: The Latino Presence in American Art.”

Back row, l to r: Juan Morales, Valerie Martinez, Carmen Catalayud, Samuel Miranda, John Chavez. Middle row, l to r: E. Carmen Ramos, Maritza Rivera, Yvette Neisser Moreno, Emma Trelles, Elizabeth Acevedo. Front row, l to r: Brenda Cardenas, Carlos Parada Ayala, Francisco Aragon, Dan Vera.

The exhibition, curated by E. Carmen Ramos, originated and is currently on view at the Smithsonian Museum of American Art. It will soon travel to Miami, Florida, Sacramento, California; Salt Lake City, Utah; Little Rock, Arkansas; and Wilmington, Delaware. Letras Latinas is already organizing a PINTURA/PALABRA for Miami, the exhibit’s next stop on its national tour, and additional workshops and programming will follow.

I’m grateful to PINTURA/PALABRA. The creative renewal I experienced during our three days in DC was the perfect anodyne for any writer who has meandered far from her craft, and from the inspiration that can charge it. Work, family, the dull shine of procrastination, or simply staring out the window at the azaleas exploding white along the sidewalk (an essential kind of musing for poets) – any of these divides us, sometimes quite willingly, from writing. Visiting the exhibit, with pen and notebook in hand, I was drawn to a wildly diverse collection of 92 paintings, photographs, sculpture and the like by 72 Latino/a visual artists, and I was able to respond immediately and with little censure or delay.

Camas para Sueños, a gouache on paper made in 1985 by Carmen Lomas Garza, depicts a tender homage to family and the cultural traditions that sustain us. I connected to it immediately, thinking of my younger brother and the hours we spent in the backyard of our childhood home, playing H-O-R-S-E or catching lizards or simply dreaming our own plans for the future.

It’s a time I don’t think about as much anymore, and it felt important to record some of the painting’s intimacy alongside the memories it sparked because my notebooks are the birthplace of so many of my poems.

A small sample of other works I found arresting: Nocturnal(Horizon Line), by Teresita Fernández, a hypnotic landscape layered in horizontal strips of graphite that evoke nighttime and moonlight, and, to me, the shorelines of South Florida, where I was raised and where the artist also lived and studied. 

The artwork that pushed me to draft an actual poem (vs. notes) while in DC, however, was Decoy Gang War Victim, by the 1970s/80s Chicano art collective Asco.  The photograph resembles a movie still and was part of a conceptual-performance series that protested violence, the war in Vietnam, and the media’s regard of Latinos and their culture as violent and of little value. With its shadowed & haunting blue palette, and a pale body splayed in the street as if about to ascend, the photograph possessed what Yeats called a “terrible beauty.” I was compelled to write about it.

Decoy Gang War Victim, Asco, 1974, printed 2010, chromogenic print.

The members of our workshop inspired me as well, a creatively curious assembly of Latino/a writers with backgrounds in history, journalism, academia, visual arts, and more. PINTURA/PALABRA was created by Francisco Aragon, a poet, editor, and director of Letras Latinas, and the DC program was led by two extraordinary poets and educators: Brenda Cardenas and Valerie Martinez. Both provided us with a wealth of writing prompts and ekphrastic poems to mull over long before we arranged our chairs around a first floor conference room at the museum and began to talk shop.

Cardenas and Martinez kicked things off with a colloquium at the Library of Congress, where they discussed the multitude of paths poets may take during their ekphrastic travels. “To me,” said Martinez. “The artwork is correlative, a place to find resonance. Ekphrasis is a way of arriving to the unexpected when we give ourselves over to language. Because language has its own kind of knowledge.”

The weekend closed with a reading at Busboys & Poets, where Split This Rock’s Sunday Kind of Love series graciously welcomed all of the PINTURA/PALABRA poets to read at its spirited monthly gathering. Here’s “Nexus,” by Brenda Cardenas, a poem she read to a packed house and that she had previously wrote in response to Ana Mendieta’s Silueta series.

Nexus

(after Ana Mendieta’s Silueta series, earth-body works, 1973-80)

This body always compost—

hair a plot of thin green stems

snowing a shroud of petals,

skin mud-sucked to bark,

trunk only timber isthmusing

river banks, each finger

a dirty uprooting.

How many stones did I have

to swallow before my legs

believed their own weight?

Dropped into silhouette

of thigh and hip, a ridge

of ossicles crushed to fine

white whispers. Offering Cuilapán

their orphaned pleas, one

twin lingers outside the nave, one

cloistered in a vaulted niche,

its ledge of red roses edging

her blood-soaked robes.

Meat, bone—a deer’s skitter

and bolt from the arrow,

an iguana’s severed tail, spiny tracks.

They say we dig our own graves.

I have laid me down

in a Yagul tomb, outlined

my island arms with twig, rock,

blossom, mud. Our pulse with fire,

glass and blood. I’ve raised

myself in the earth’s beds, left

this map, this exiled breath.

Emma Trelles is the author of Little Spells (GOSS183 Press) and Tropicalia (University of Notre Dame Press), winner of the Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize and a finalist for ForeWord Reviews’ poetry book of the year. Her work has appeared in The Best American Poetry, PoetsArtists, Terrain.org, Best of the Net, The Rumpus, the Miami Herald, the Sun-Sentinel, and others. In 2013, she was awarded an Individual Artist Fellowship in poetry from the Florida Division of Cultural Affairs.

AWP NEWS: Find her Saturday, March 1, from 1:30 pm – 2:45 pm at the AWP Seattle Conference panel, PUBLISHED! From Poetry Manuscript to First Book (Room 303, Western New England MFA Annex, Level 3) and later that evening at the launch for Kalina: The Theatre Under My Skin, a bilingual collection of contemporary Salvadoran poetry (From 6 pm – 7:30 pm, The Rendezvous Lounge at the Jewelbox Theatre, The Grotto, 2322 2nd Ave., Seattle).