in the coachella valley
children go to school and learn how to internalize silence
girls sit pretty with pigtails wrapped in bubble-ball hair ties
learn how to cast their eyes downward
so that when they ask the class what do you want to be when you grow up?
boys respond, i want to work in the fields like my dad
Lifting Visqueen veils spread over little darlings,
selecting seedlings to set each predawn rise.
We coffeed up, chewed rumors, shared ourselves
wherever needed without a hint of roundworm
belly, malathion burn, or pay bounce still to come.
By LUPE MENDEZ
Todo mi maíz se llevó, ni pa’comer me dejó
El Barzón.
—Luis Pérez Meza
Esas tierras del rincón,
I look at them como un buey pando,
feeling the dry earth, crunch under
my boots. Es Julio, y si sigue asi,
dirán que es sequía. I pray it is not.
Not the circus of constellations
rifled with shooting stars
from nights we slept by the river.
Neither of us see or hear the kittens
when we set the garbage pile at the farm on fire.
We come back to spines and white smoke—
that means a new Pope is coming—
“By the sweat of your brow
you will eat your food
until you return to the ground,
since from it you were taken;
for dust you are
and to dust you will return.”
Genesis 3:19
i.
In many ways we knew we had no choice.
We woke in time to tell the stars goodnight,
Returned to broken homes and heard the fights.
Es de madrugada.
It is dawn always dawn
the sun breaking through
the breaking of the soil.
The faint smell of rain from irrigated dirt
crusts of mud from the crop rows
comes home with my father
on his pants and beneath his fingernails.
There is no time to complain,
only time to move as fast as you can
through the rows of low-lying shrubs,
the tall stalks.
The people of the fields leave
the complaining to the rest of us,
driving by on our way to work,
school,
the gym.
Chrome glinted
sunrise, bumpers, rear views.
Backside of cars parked full of sleep
just an hour past.
By ELLYN GAYDOS
I live on a wooded road posted with NO TRESPASSING PROPERTY OF GEORGE FUDGE signs. In addition to being a large landowner, George Fudge rents out dumpsters, and is rumored to be an ex-con and confirmed to be a minister. When the season is right, he plows snow. He’s plowed my driveway more than once for free. I am surrounded by good intentions. On the wall of the post office there is a note that says, I am an honest girl, written by a customer who took a card costing $2.99 and left $3. The town maintains a free rack of clothing outside the dollar store, kids’ jumpers and XL T-shirts fluttering brightly.
I work on a small vegetable farm carved out of hayfields owned by the local high school and woods owned by the local commune. The other young farmers and I grow food for a hundred families that come each week to get shares of vegetables, which begin in spring as ephemeral greens and end in winter as sacks of beets and potatoes.
Home from work with a heavy trash bag of compost for my pigs, I find the escaped animals locked in the chicken coop. They got out in the unwatchful summer afternoon, their snouts bending up the bottom of the fence to roam undeterred past illegible PRIVATE PROPERTY signs. They were escaping their squalid pen out of pure misery, I think. I had been watching them get shocked trying to push through, seeming genuinely angry, for the past few days, putting off moving the fence out of laziness or a desire to escape the drudgery of what I’d taken on.
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