Not one more refugee death, by Emmy Pérez

And just like that, my #NPM2018 celebrations end with a poem today by Emmy Pérez.


Not one more refugee death
by Emmy Pérez

A river killed a man I loved,
And I love that river still—María Meléndez

1.

Thousands of fish killed after Pemex

spill in el Río Salado and everyone

runs out to buy more bottled water.

Here, our river kills more crossers

than the sun, than the singular

heat of Arizona, than the ranchlands

near the Falfurrias checkpoint.

It's hard to imagine an endangered

river with that much water, especially

in summer and with the Falcon Reservoir

in drought, though it only takes inches

to drown. Sometimes, further

west, there's too little river

to paddle in Boquillas Canyon

where there are no steel-column walls

except the limestone canyon's drop

and where a puma might push-wade across,

or in El Paso, where double-fenced muros

sparkle and blind with bullfight ring lights,

the ring the concrete river mold, and above

a Juárez mountain urges

La Biblia es La Verdad—Leela.

2.

Today at the vigil, the native singer

said we are all connected

by water, la sangre de vida.

Today, our vigil signs proclaimed

McAllen is not Murrieta.

#iamborderless. Derechos

Inmigrantes=Derechos

Humanos. Bienvenidos niños.

We stand with refugee children.

We are all human. Bienvenidos

a los Estados Unidos.

And the songs we sang

the copal that burned

and the rose petals spread

en los cuatro puntos were

for the children and women

and men. Songs

for the Guatemalan

boy with an Elvis belt buckle

and Angry Birds jeans with zippers

on back pockets who was found

shirtless in La Joya, one mile

from the river. The worn jeans

that helped identify his body

in the news more times

than a photo of him while alive.

(I never knew why the birds

are angry. My mother said

someone stole their eggs.)

The Tejas sun took a boy

I do not know, a young man

who wanted to reach Chicago,

his brother's number etched in

his belt, his mother's pleas not

to leave in white rosary beads

he carried. The sun in Tejas

stopped a boy the river held.

Detention centers filled, churches

offer showers and fresh clothes.

Water and a covered porch may

have waited at a stranger's house

or in a patrol truck had his body

not collapsed. Half of our bodies

are made of water, and we can't

sponge rivers through skin

and release them again

like rain clouds. Today

at the vigil the native singer

sang we are all connected

by water, la sangre de vida.

From With the River on Our Face. © 2016 by Emmy Pérez  | University of Arizona Press.

____

About the poet: Emmy Pérez is a Chicana poet and writer originally from Santa Ana, California. She has lived on the Texas-Mexico border, from El Paso to the Rio Grande Valley (where she currently lives), since the year 2000. A graduate of Columbia University (MFA) and the University of Southern California (BA), she is the author of the poetry collections With the River on Our Face (University of Arizona Press) and Solstice (Swan Scythe Press).  

Pérez is the recipient of a 2017 National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in poetry. In previous years, she was a recipient of poetry fellowships from CantoMundo, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the MacDowell Colony, the Ucross Foundation, and the Atlantic Center for the Arts. She has also received the Alfredo Cisneros Del Moral Foundation Award for her poetry and the James D. Phelan Award for her prose writing. Since 2008, she has been a member of the Macondo Writers' Workshop founded by Sandra Cisneros for socially engaged writers.

Over the years, she has served as a writing mentor and workshop facilitator at detention centers in New Mexico, El Paso, and the Rio Grande Valley in South Texas. She has also taught writing at the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP) and El Paso Community College. In 2004-2005, she was a visiting assistant professor of creative writing at UTEP, and served as visiting director of the West Texas Writing Project 2005. In 2006, she began a tenure-track position in creative writing at the University of Texas-Pan American, a legacy institution for present-day University of Texas Rio Grande Valley (UTRGV), where she currently is an associate professor in the MFA and undergraduate creative writing programs. She is also an affiliate faculty member in Mexican American Studies. In 2008, she founded an annual event on campus “El Retorno: El Valle Celebra Nuestra Gloria" that she coordinates in honor of the late writer and scholar from the Valley, Gloria E. Anzaldúa. Over the years, she and her students, through service learning projects, have taught creative writing to youth and adults in Edinburg detention center facilities/programs and in community-based programs and schools. In 2012, she received a University of Texas Regents’ Outstanding Teaching Award, and in 2016, a University Faculty Excellence Award for Student Mentoring. In 2016-2017, she served as interim director for the Center for Mexican American Studies at UTRGV. She has been awarded faculty development leave for the 2017-2018 academic school year with the support of the NEA poetry fellowship she received to work on her next book project. 

We Lived Happily During the War, by Ilya Kaminsky

Today, a poem by Ilya Kaminsky, who I heard about only this month via a Poetry magazine podcast.


We Lived Happily During the War
by Ilya Kaminsky

And when they bombed other people’s houses, we

protested

but not enough, we opposed them but not

enough. I was

in my bed, around my bed America

was falling: invisible house by invisible house by invisible house.

I took a chair outside and watched the sun.

In the sixth month

of a disastrous reign in the house of money

in the street of money in the city of money in the country of money,

our great country of money, we (forgive us)

lived happily during the war.

Source: Poetry International 2013 (© 2013, Ilya Kaminsky)

_____
About the poet: Poet Ilya Kaminsky was born in 1977 in the former Soviet Union city of Odessa. He lost most of his hearing at the age of four after a doctor misdiagnosed mumps as a cold, and his family was granted political asylum by the United States in 1993, settling in Rochester, New York. After his father’s death in 1994, Kaminsky began to write poems in English. He explained in an interview with the Adirondack Review, “I chose English because no one in my family or friends knew it—no one I spoke to could read what I wrote. I myself did not know the language. It was a parallel reality, an insanely beautiful freedom. It still is.”

Kaminsky went on to earn a BA in political science at Georgetown University and a JD at the University of California’s Hastings College of the Law. With Paloma Capanna, he co-founded Poets for Peace, which sponsors poetry readings across the globe to support relief work. He has also worked as a clerk for the National Immigration Law Center and for Bay Area Legal Aid. Kaminsky is the author of Dancing in Odessa (2004), which won the Tupelo Press Dorset Prize, the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Metcalf Award, and ForeWord Magazine’s Best Poetry Book of the Year award, and has been translated into French and Romanian. Traveling Musicians(2007) is a selection of his poems originally written in Russian. His forthcoming book Deaf Republic will be published in 2019 by Greywolf Press. He co-edited, with Susan Harris, the Ecco Anthology of International Poetry (2010), and edited and co-translated Polina Barskova’s This Lamentable City (2010). He has also served as the editor of the online journal In Posse Review. Kaminsky’s honors include a Whiting Writers’ Award, the Milton Center’s Award for Excellence in Writing, the Florence Kahn Memorial Award, Poetry magazine’s Levinson Prize as well as their Ruth Lilly Fellowship, Philips Exeter Academy’s George Bennett Fellowship, and a Lannan Foundation fellowship.

Old Addresses, by Chekwube Danladi

Today, a poem by Chekwube O. Danladi

​

OLD ADDRESSES

by Chekwube O. Danladi

Sloppily shorn nappy hairs
A half full bed

Stirring above
the seizure of the
washing machine
A junkie for neglect rending

the half empty bed
Finger paint art
pretending to gesture
Chasing your face in a dream
where I'm sitting on it

You as a girl when you
used to be
dancing with a black boy prom date

Three parallel scars
fighting to be reinvested
A maelstrom of Derrida
almost resonating

Donna Summers’ sexy squeal
something like I want to do
A luminous half-light

The Devil's array of scores
Him two God zero

There are days we run
naked through wishing
we knew each other as teenagers

The shit-smell of new diagnoses inherited
polarities pealed into lamplight
Cockroaches giving birth beneath
my pillow

banal weight gain
enthused weight loss
a frosted donut
A chest binder, black

N-body physics
embodied in the swirling of prairie grass

Dirty rain in the cistern
Apartment number five
The darkness of my eyes

__
About the poet:  Chekwube O. Danladi was born in Lagos, Nigeria and raised there, as well as in Washington DC and West Baltimore. Danladi's poetry chapbook, Take Me Back, was recently published as part of the New-Generation African Poets Series: Nne, edited by Chris Abani and Kwame Dawes.  A Callaloo Fellow, Danladi's writing prioritizes themes of teleological displacement, navigations and interrogations of gender and sexuality, and the necessary resilience of African and Afro-diasporic communities.  ​They are currently working on a novel about queers living in Abuja, Nigeria. Follow Chekwube on Twitter at: @codanladi. 

At Twilight on the Road to Sogamoso, by Maurice Kilwein Guevara

Today, a poem by Maurice Kilwein Guevara.

At Twilight on the Road to Sogamoso

by Maurice Kilwein Guevara

The sun is beginning to go down

over a field of yellow onions. The edges

of the clouds are almost pink, and at this hour

the maguey rises up like a flower of dark blades.

I worked so long today I have forgotten

my own hunger. It takes a full minute

for me to remember a word I have used

all my life. What the Mexicans call poncho.

At twilight I see it, abandoned, hanging like a ghost

on the limb of a tree: my own brown ruana

next to gray speckled chickens pecking at roots

and a black track of storm coming west over the green mountain.

__
About the poet:   Poet, playwright, and actor Maurice Kilwein Guevara was born in Belencito, Colombia in 1961, and raised in Pittsburgh. He earned a BA in English and a BS in psychology from the University of Pittsburgh, an MFA from Bowling Green State University, and a PhD in English and comparative literature from the University of Wisconsin. Lilwein Guevara’s poems often use overlapping voices and languages to explore the tensions and simultaneities that complicate the lives of immigrants in mid-America. Kilwein Guevara has published several collections of poetry, including POEMA (2009); Autobiography of So-and-so: Poems in Prose (2001), nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize; and Postmortem (1994), nominated for the National Book Award. Kilwein Guevara co-wrote, with John Trevellini and Mike Sell, and acted in the film To Box Clouds (2002). His play, The Last Bridge/El Ultimo Puente (1999), received a staged reading Off-Broadway.  Kilwein Guevara’s honors include a Fulbright Scholarship in Colombia and awards from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts and the Pennsylvania Humanities Council. He is a founding member of the National Latino Writers’ Association and has taught at the University of Wisconsin and at Indiana University of Pennsylvania.

At the school dances white and black girls shook on the floor, by Anais Duplan

Today, a poem by Anaïs Duplan, from the Bennington Review.

• [AT THE SCHOOL DANCES WHITE AND BLACK GIRLS SHOOK ON THE FLOOR.]

•   
• At the school dances, black and white girls shook on the floor.
• A crowd of trees formed around them. There was a countdown
• to the day when everyone would be shot. The administration said
• it was all right not to go to school that day so everyone hung
• out with friends. I talked to Sam about it. He thought we
• should’ve been there with the lockers, the classrooms, the desks,
• in the thick of it. With the guns and the youth, even if they were just ideas––
• not a present body, not to-day—in the tick of things. It wasn’t my day.
• I am speaking to you plainly now. Not from beyond the grave.

Poem from her book,  Mount Carmel and the Blood of Parnassus

___

About the poet:  Anaïs Duplan is the author of a full-length poetry collection, Take This Stallion (Brooklyn Arts Press, 2016) and a chapbook, Mount Carmel and the Blood of Parnassus (Monster House Press, 2017). Their poems and essays have been published by Hyperallergic, PBS News Hour, the Academy of American Poets, Poetry Society of America, Bettering American Poetry, and Ploughshares. Their music criticism has appeared in Complex Magazine and  THUMP.


Duplan is a curator who has facilitated artists’ projects and exhibitions in Chicago, Boston, Santa Fe, Reykjavík, and Copenhagen. Duplan’s video art has appeared or is forthcoming in exhibitions at Flux Factory, Daata Editions, the 13th Baltic Triennial in Lithuania, and the Institute of Contemporary Art in L.A. Duplan is the founder of the Center for Afrofuturist Studies, an artist residency program for artists of color, and is currently a joint Public Programs Fellow at the Museum of Modern Art and the Studio Museum in Harlem.

@Allah, by Anjuli Fatima Raza Kolb

Today, a poem by Anjuli Fatima Raza Kolb

@Allah 

by Anjuli Fatima Raza Kolb

In a seaside desert port

that wasn’t yet a city

our grandfather built a wide house

and called it gulistan 

There were no roses there

just the new government

four children that would be seven and a porch

where he stitched shoes and mixed paste

for paper maché book bindings

He counted buds

and tended love birds

built their cage and bedecked it

in blue and green and red

foil this and gota that

a cage the cat got into

in front of the open water tankard

the children got into

during this or that fatal game

Loose with life

while their father cycled home

in starched and ironed whites

polished porch stitched black leather shoes

a narrow mustache

we now associate with genocide

What is reverence anyway

who writes the reverence rules

After our grandmother died

he developed a taste for Western sweets

Flintstones pushpops and cokes and nerds

Of all the things he typed

and the typing was profuse

none changed the course of history

Like the verses of the Qur’an

rendered in @ signs

which he used as a coiled pixel

taxing the Smith-Corona

Coronamatic with his gridded plan

Let’s hate the names of things

like this

Before they changed the world with typewriters

the Smith brothers manufactured firearms

Cartridge and ribbon

bullet and thermal transfer

Syracuse and gulistan

Verses laid out in rows of @

seven @s in a vertical row

to make an alif 

@s like a fallen E

to make a tashdeed

He did the whole Qur’an this way

At some point in paleography

they discovered this sign filling in

for the A of Amen or Ameen

in a Bulgarian version   

of a fourteenth century Greek chronicle

Why and for whom or does

The Book short circuit this question

A smaller selection I have

is a better plot for dirt ministrations

just sura 8 ayah 46

inna Allaha maaAa al sabireen 

Allah is with the patient ones

laid out in vertical reflection

its geometry a formal garden

hemmed by squares of @

looking in four directions

paths and hedges of invocation

borders of apostrophe

trees of hail and leaves of call

I wonder did he think

his helical pixels looked like roses

I wonder did he count

the buds in every verse

____

About the poet: Anjuli Fatima Raza Kolb grew up in Albany, New York and Cambridge, Massachusetts, and studied Comparative Literature at Columbia and also earned a PhD at Columbia University in 2014, with a dissertation entitled “Epidemiology of Terror: Health, Horror, and Politics in Colonial and Postcolonial Literature.” Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in 3 Quarks Daily, Discourse, the Los Angeles Review of Books, BookForum, Boston Review, Triple Canopy, the Bennington Review, Public Pool, and Syndicate Lit. Raza Kolb is assistant professor of English and comparative literature at Williams College, where she teaches postcolonial theory and literature. She also currently holds the Edward W. Said Fellowship at Columbia’s Heyman Center for the Humanities, and is visiting expert scholar in Women’s Studies at City College, New York. She is completing a scholarly book about Islam and the epidemic imaginary in colonial letters, and a collection of poems called Janaab-e Shikva, after the Pakistani poet Iqbal. 

One Night I Will Return to My Birthplace, by Majid Naficy

Today, a poem by Majid Naficy


One Night I Will Return to My Birthplace
by Majid Naficy
(Translation by Elizabeth T Gray Jr)

One night I will return to my birthplace 
to stand on my rooftop
and pick stars.

Father will say, ‘Look, There!
Don’t you see the Seven Brothers?’
I will stretch out my hands
and caress their unsheathed swords.
Then the nightly battle will begin.
Together we will cast out the moon-eating dragon 
and in the dark corners of heaven
we will fasten each star firmly in place.

At dawn Mother will say, ‘Look,
There! Don’t you see the Two Sisters?’
I will stretch out my hands
and caress their jugs of water.
They are the messengers of the rain-making clouds 
that disappear with the rising sun.

My brothers! My sisters!
One night I will return to my birthplace 
so that under my childhood sky
I will find again my own stars.


NOTE: The ‘Seven Brothers’ refers to the Pleiades, and the ‘Two Sisters’ are the dog stars Sirius and Procyon.
__

About the poet: Majid Naficy fled Iran in 1983, a year and a half after the execution of his wife Ezzat in Tehran. Since 1984 Majid has lived in West Los Angeles. Naficy’s poetry has been widely anthologized, and he has published two collections of poetry in English, Muddy Shoes (Beyond Baroque, Books, 1999) and Father and Son (Red Hen Press, 2003).

A longer bio via the Translation project: Majid Naficy was born in Iran in 1952. He published poetry, criticism and an award-winning children’s book in Iran. During the 1970’s Dr. Naficy was politically active against the Shah’s regime. After the 1979 Revolution, as the new regime began to suppress the opposition, his first wife, Ezzat Tabaian and his brother Sa’id were amongst the many to be executed. He fled Iran in 1983, eventually settling in Los Angeles with his son Azad. He has since published six volumes of poetry in both English and Farsi, as well as numerous books of criticism. His most recent volume of poetry in English, Father and Son, was published in 2003 by Red Hen Press and his poem “I Don’t Want You Petroleum” appears in Sam Hamill’s Poets Against the War (Thunder’s Mouth Press / Nation Books, April 2003). He holds a doctorate in Near Eastern Languages and Cultures from the University of California in Los Angeles. His doctoral dissertation, Modernism and Idealogy in Persian Literature: A Return to Nature in the Poetry of Nima Yushij (University Press of America) was published in 1997. Dr. Naficy is also the co-editor of Daftarhaye Kanoon, a periodical in Farsi published by the Iranian Writer’s Association in Exile.