La Corrida

By AIDEED MEDINA 

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.

He must change out of his work clothes
in the garage. His
jeans
socks
shirts
contaminated by pesticide residue
are washed
                  separately
from the rest of the family laundry.
 
My mother
works on the machines in the lettuce fields
wrapping the heads in thin printed plastic
covered in bright letters
meant to draw customers’ eyes.
 
She is proud of the smooth, seamless wrap,
the speed with which she can fill huge boxes.
These heads of lettuce are her art.
 
There are three of us children
taken out of bed before dawn,
wrapped in blankets.
 
We are carried out to the waiting car,
motor on, steam rising from the undercarriage.
I stay still
so I don’t have to walk.
My mother and my aunt talk.
I listen to their conversations,
leaning on my baby sister and brother.
 
The sitter waits for us,
bag of freshly cooked lunches,
box of cereal,
gallon of milk.
 
There are never sick days; there are never vacations
unless there is no work in the fields,
and even then, the work can be followed
hunted down, chased through
California
      Arizona
           Washington.
 
My father follows the crops,
with a tribe of seasonal bachelors.
Sending back wages,
minus the cost of rent,
the cost of food,
the high cost of separated lives.
 
My mother searches packing sheds
along the roads for work.
La corrida,
running for our lives.

 

Aideed Medina is a Pushcart Prize-nominated poet, spoken word artist, and playwright, and daughter of Miguel and Lupita Medina of Salinas, California, and the United Farm Workers movement. She is the author of 31 Hummingbird and a forthcoming full-length poetry collection, Segmented Bodies, from Prickly Pear Press. 

[Purchase Issue 26 here.]

La Corrida

Related Posts

Mantra 5

KRIKOR BELEDIAN
from channel to channel / the lengthening beauty of shadows that float and bow down / and suck at the stones and planks / of the damp, bitter fog / of loneliness, / stone horses let loose their golden neighs / and the waters transform to / stained glass

Book cover of Concerning the Angels by Rafael Alberti

January 2025 Poetry Feature #2: Rafael Alberti in Translation

RAFAEL ALBERTI
Who are you, tell us, who do not remember you / from earth or from heaven? // Your shadow—tell us—is from what space? / What light, say it, has reached / into our realm? // Where do you come from, tell us, / shadow without words, / that we don’t remember you?

The Old Current Book Cover

January 2025 Poetry Feature #1: Brad Leithauser

BRAD LEITHAUSER
I’m twenty-seven, maybe too old to be / Upended by this, the manifold / Foreignness of it all, the fulfilling / Queer grandeur of it all, // But we each come into ourselves / As each can, in our own / Unmetered time (our own sweet way), / And for me this day’s more thrilling