Life Goes In Circles

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Joaquin Zihuatanejo is a husband/father/poet/teacher.  Always in that order.  He considers himself the Luther Vandross of the greater Dallas Kereoke scene.  He lost his first fist fight in second grade to a girl named Marcy Peavy.  But in his defense she was stocky and he had not yet seen the Karate Kid and thus had not yet been exposed to the paint the fence technique that would have proved beneficial in blocking her swift kick to the nuts.  He once played kickball in the rain for hours with a bunch of mocosos from the neighborhood.  He counts this day as one of his best.  He has been told by two Caucasians and three African Americans that he looks like he has a little Black in him.  His daughter has been asked by one Mexican American and one white person, are you part Black?  Which leads him to believe that he may have a little Black in him…he’s not sure.  He went to college and graduated with a BA in English.  He is currently working on is MA in English.  He hates English and thinks it is the most godforsaken language on the planet.  As a teenager in the middle of a dark summer night, he once rode on the back of a moped with his friend Manny Valdez from Barrio East Side to downtown Dallas and back, all the while holding an am/fm cassette player boom box with graphic equalizer.  The cassette in the tape deck was Escape by Journey.  He had the volume turned all the way up.  In 2006 he received a perfect score of 30 in the final round of the Individual World Poetry Slam.  In that round, he read for 3 minutes and 11 seconds (you are only allowed to read for 3 minutes and 10 seconds).  He received a one second time penalty.  He placed second in the world that year.  In 2008, he returned to The Individual World Poetry Slam and received a perfect score of 30 in the final round.  He read for 3 minutes and 9 seconds.  He is currently the World Poetry Slam Champion.  He snuck into the State Fair of Texas by climbing the fence behind the side show world of wonders tents from 1983 to 1987.  He believes in God and prays for his children and wife often.  He does not like to pray for himself.  He is the son of a woman that he does not know well and the son of a man that he does not know at all.  He was raised by his grandfather, who grew tomatoes, poems, and children in his small garden.  He tends to vote Democratic.  He believes the United States should have a uniform healthcare system similar to the ones that exist in France or Cuba.  He likes movies where the protagonist finds hope in a hopeless situation.  He has a photograph of him and Alicia Keys hugging each other.  He will show it to you if you ask.  He reads more than he writes and thinks that Sherman Alexie and Jhumpa Lahiri are geniuses and will be taught in literature books hundreds of years from now.  He co-wrote the book, of fire and rain, with natasha carrizosa.  He thinks it is the best work he has ever created.  He once saw a giant monarch butterfly dance with his daughter on the banks of the Trinity River.  He counts this day as his best.  In seventh grade, while Toby and Jerome beat-boxed and rapped in the cafeteria during lunch, he attempted to make a name for himself as a break dancer, and challenged Ramón, a chubby, awkward kid from the barrio to a break dance battle.  He would find out this day that Ramón was the lovechild of Ginger Rogers and Rerun from What’s Happening.  He lost this first battle, but not the war.  In 1989 he met a Puerto Rican girl named Aida.  That same year, he wrote her a short poem that reads, “Remember when I told you/that you are the kind of girl/that I could easily fall in love with/I did/I am.”  She still has the poem.  He still has her.

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Abuelo’s Garden

Bendito,
Bendito,
Bendito sea a Dios
los angeles cantan y daban a Dios

Memories of my grandfather’s garden come back to me
differently than other child of the hood memories
Memories of my grandfather’s garden come back to me
in well water voices
in deep chest hymns
that begin as a gurgle deep in the belly and rise to the throat
slowly
I remember little of the day my friends jumped me in
I remember fists flailing and afterwards
those deep, fleshy embraces
only Latinos know how to give
but grandfather’s garden comes back to me with aromas, with tastes
with corridos sung to the sun
with novenas sung to the moon
thanking both sides of life
the light and the dark
for their bountiful harvests
Ay, Dios mio,
all those nights we knelt together in brown earth
it was always about harmony, about balance
He’d intone deeply thanking the life giving soil for its gift
and I’d follow suit
carefully pulling up cilantro, manzanilla, yerba del manso
always making sure metal spade never touches fragile root
sweet, ancient Abuelito,
how could I be anything but a poet after these moments we shared
Don’t you see,
In my grandfather’s garden
chiles grew
In my grandfather’s garden
children grew
In my grandfather’s garden
poems rose from the earth
like the twisted arms of la llorona desperately reaching out for her missing children
In my grandfather’s garden all of these things grew
slowly
because,
beautiful things take time to bloom
In my grandfather’s garden all of these things would rise
slowly
like
well water voices
like
deep chest hymns
that begin as a gurgle deep in the belly and rise to the throat
slowly
singing
always singing

Bendito,
Bendito,
Bendito sea a Dios
los angeles cantan y daban a Dios
los angeles cantan y daban a Dios
____________________

19 Mexicans

Once while walking with Jesús Santos,
Vato loco with the holiest name on record,
Pilfering through alleys with nothing on our minds but trouble
He said to me—
Joaquín mira,
Look at that clump of sunflowers
In the middle of all this filth,
Their petals outstretched like the arms of Nahuatl pole dancers
Constantly reaching out for their sun god.
He said this to me,
He was the first poet I had ever known—

That night, I read him “Mending Wall” by Frost,
And after I read the last line
He looked up into the early evening sky above us
At the Virgin’s horned moon,
And he said something to me I’ll never forget
He said,
Sometimes I feel like putting my fist through every wall in the world

And that’s how I feel today,

I want to put my fist through every wall in the world
Every line in the dirt
Every border
Every boundary
Because I’m tired
Of locking people out,
And I’m tired
Of locking myself in,

Report on news station says,
19 die in semitrailer

19 illegals die of asphyxiation and dehydration
And everything in the news story is there
The who, the what, the when, and the where
But the one thing that’s missing—
Is the why
And that’s all I really want to know,
Why did this atrocity have to happen?
Because of a border that wasn’t even there a thousand years ago—
And when I look at pictures of survivors
In my mind’s eye I can see the dead.
And they are all olive skin, high cheek bones, dark wild hair
They are my mother.
They are my daughters.
They are me.
I am them.
I am in that trailer clawing through insulation and tin
With fingernails for air holes
I am holding the viejito in my arms,
As he dies whispering the Act of Contrition over and over and over again,
Oh my God, I am sorry for all my sins because they displease Thee, Lord,
Who art all good and deserving…
I am that woman holding her lifeless child,
I am that woman screaming mi niño, mi niño, mi niño,
And I am that boy in her arms,
That terrible child of nowhere.
I am all those people who died,
I am those six unidentified males,
I am José Felicito, age 92
I am José M. Tejada, age 34
I am Serafin Rivera Gámez, age 33
I am Roberto Rivera Gámez, age 30
I am Felicito Figueroa, age unknown
I am Oscar González Guerrero, age unknown
I am Ricardo González Mata, age 24
I am Edgar Gabriel Hernández Zuniga, age 17
I am Jose Antonio Villaseñor Leon, age 31
And I am Marco
Antoñio
Villaseñor
Acuna, age 5
And I died,
In a dark trailer—
In the middle of a Texas summer,
Amidst screams and wails,
Begging God
For water,
Begging God
For air,
Begging God
For just the smallest chance
At freedom

And all I want to know is

why

_______________

Something that Lives Between the Two

8:30 am is too early for calculus
There is no poetic way to say this
So we brave few start our day
By sneaking tacos from Café Galaviz into a classroom
Where food is strictly prohibited by the administration
But not the teacher
And we read poems by people whose last names
Sound like the word for love in a foreign tongue

Forché
Alegría
Basho
Neruda

And we spend countless hours looking for the poetry all around us,
And find it
Sometimes in places we expect
Other times, the best of times, in places we don’t,
Marisol raises her hand

Mr. Zihuatanejo, my name,
I have always known that it means sea and sun
But last night I watched my mother
Calm the storm inside of my father
By simply saying his name softly
And placing her hand on his shoulder
And I realize now
That my mother is water
And my father is fire
And I am something that lives between the two

___________________________

Yardman

He works rigid soil.
He acknowledges the brown
of him, of the earth.

__________

Child of Conquest

When he discovered her
My father
Gave my mother
Some of that Christopher Columbus type love
Conquered her because she was beautiful
Stripped of her of everything and left her bare
But even after all this
She still longed for his kiss
Dug her fingers into his flesh
Like he was the shore after a long journey at sea
This is where I come from
This is me
I am a child of conquest
Born to a man and woman
Practiced in the art of wanting things they shouldn’t have
And when push came to shove
He was not above letting her know that her lips taste like unrequited love
But I will not begrudge my mother and father
For giving me the blood that flows through these veins
For planting the seed that grows from these pains
But I have grown weary of carrying their hate
Let the séance begin
Let the spirits depart
Tear down the wall they erected that bisects my heart
My mother told me once,
You were born with a tongue as sharp as sword
When your words play warrior they could slit my wrists
You have your father to thank for this
And believe me,
I’m no better than my father
I just know better than my father
Was never blind enough to mistake love for slaughter
So if you have the courage to place your hand in mine
I will take that opportunity
To kiss your pulse
Barter the feel of your skin against my lips
For every twisted impulse
That he instilled in me
But I look too much like my father for my mother to believe
And I look too much like my mother for my father to grieve
About what he did to her,
Or what he did to me
So they both had no qualms about leaving me
They just boarded new relationships
And sailed off in exact opposite directions
To far off foreign suburbs
They each took half of my heart and left me the wall
With no way to get to the other side
But they forgot to cut off my hands
And they failed to cut out my tongue
So I use them
To write a poem as sharp as a knife
Fill it with similes as hard as this life
And with it I scrape through the mortar
Bit by bit
Dismantle the wall
Brick by brick
And step over the last remnants of what they did to me
And I walk away
All the way to the sea
Raise the white flag up the shipwrecked mast
To let them both know
I’ve made peace with my past

I drop to my knees
Kiss the shifting shore and the fleeing sea
For all that they’ve given and taken from me
I just kneel there
Not knowing whether to cry or smile
You see, it’s been a while since I’ve felt I had nothing to hide
So I use my hands to mock the tide
And carve you both one last poem in the sand
That simply reads,

I’ve been baptized by your pain
Made filthy by your worst
Cleansed by your best

And signed it

Your loving son,
A child of conquest