When you’re not packing cherries, you pass out crowns of Crossandra flowers
to every coworker who’s crossed a border.
You think of your father, when he said no to you moving to the city to study chemistry.
I’ve never admitted how it altered me.
I try not to think about it—the spring
the junior dropped out of school
after wearing a wire so the police could cuff
Mr. Cawley—led him out of the high school
down the long beige corridor of B-Hall
past the AP History class where I sat
with my textbook open to some European War,
trying not to think about my confusion
when I stood, the May before, in Mr. Cawley’s classroom,
as he held my book report on In Search of History.
The wish is always that we’d walk in,
Give each other bear hugs,
Tight and unencumbered,
Nothing of my body shameful,
That he’d cradle my face in his palms
And smile wide, in awe of who I’ve become,
That I’d go to him twice a year
To help me unknot something of my heart
When it broke.
By DAVID LEHMAN
The month, shortest of the year, least popular, ends,
and on the radio there’s “Midnight Sun,” a concept
worthy of a Ramos Gin Fizz, if you have the ingredients,
After Rafael Alberti
I noticed the canas sprouting from her scalp, I noticed the sky,
I noticed the engines hum, I noticed my heartbeat, and the breeze.
Nunca fui a Iowa.
My mother tells me I gave her canas, and now I have my own.
Mi bisabuela worked los campos, says she was once Iowan
Nunca vi Iowa.
I cannot remember a time when I was not chosen last.
That and the great, timeless subjects: music, weather, war.
Wounds are openings through which presence shines through.
The child in the doll, Christ in the wafer, the ocean in a droplet.
This is a torn map of the forsaken world.
There are lines even wolves cannot cross.
Every voice an epitaph, then a little tune
from the neighbor’s garden apartment
suggesting a rondo, or circle of fifths.
Plato said the soul is a perfect circle.
Translated from the Spanish by MICHAEL BAZZETT
Humberto Ak’abal (1952-2019) is widely known in Guatemala. His book Guardián de la caída de agua received the Golden Quetzal award in 1993, and in 2004 he declined to receive the Guatemalan National Prize in Literature because it was named for Miguel Angel Asturias, whom Ak’abal accused of encouraging racism, noting that his views on eugenics and assimilation “offend the indigenous population of Guatemala, of which I am part.”
What does it mean then to meet Ak’abal in English? What does it mean to translate an indigenous writer who spurned institutional accolades from one dominant, oppressive language into another colonial tongue?
New poems by our contributors BRAD CRENSHAW, JOANNE DOMINIQUE DWYER, ELIZABETH HODGES and OKSANA MAKSYMCHUK
Table of Contents:
Sentences
By Oksana Maksymchuk
A ten-year-old, escaped
from a war waged across
a membranous border
Poems by RODNEY GOMEZ
This feature is part of our print and online portfolio of writing from the immigrant farmworker community. Read more online or in Issue 26.
Barrioized Haiku
When it rains the water
raises the dead
street long enough
to let the wheels
find the divots of neglect.
That is why I walked
barefoot to your lintel:
everything built skews
away from us and toward
the gray light of wealth.
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