In 1976, when I was eight years old, my Korean American father, a produce wholesaler and former farmworker, decided to become a full-time farmer. My Japanese American mother, descended from a long line of farmers and farmworkers, wanted it too. They had spent their childhoods dreaming of a home on the land, so we moved from Los Angeles to a tenant farm thirty-five miles away.
Sisters
By MIGUEL M. MORALES
with Deb Morales, MyLinda Morales Hutchings, Grace Morales
I grew up in a farmworking family.
No, that’s not accurate—it’s incomplete.
I grew up in a family of farmworking women.
The hands of our sisters, tías, cousins, mothers,
and abuelas have worked the fields, worked to feed us,
worked to raise us, worked to protect and provide for us.
I love my mom but the truth is that my sisters raised me.
Farmwork would not survive without women,
nor would farmworker families.
Double Infinity
On 88th, the street where I lived as a girl when an hour could seem an eternity, it would be years before I met the young man who pointed out that those numbers, turned on their sides, had a special meaning. What meaning? I wondered and pondered the two unbroken loops pinched at their centers, forever returning to themselves like a pair of ice skaters tracing figure eights into a state of bliss. I wondered if he thought that love is infinite, that our souls will live forever, that sky even on crystalline days moves into unseeable endless space. I was thinking that the iris of his hazel eyes pulled me into a place where I could feel lost or float before thought was possible, as if in vitro. I no longer live on 88th Street, having left double infinity in its impossible realm. Because infinity cannot be multiplied or divided—infinity just is. Still, I was grateful that I didn’t live on Main Street or Elm, and the young man I married found meaning on that finite block in Queens where he found me. |
Retoño
sugarcane fields whisper to those who reach el otro lado
descansa aquí amongst víboras y machetes
descansa aquí abajo de luna conjurada
Re(education)
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
Guinea Pig Suite
I. Lexapro
Like a booster detached from a shuttle, my body
Ended up in an ocean while fog enshrouded my mind.
Xanax never made me feel that unsteady; it just didn’t
Agree with Lamictal. I was glad my wife could cease
Preparing herself mentally before coming home; I’d been a
Rakshasa for months & appeared to be normal
Overnight, but the low dose made me immune to emotion.
Better Days
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.
El cuerpo avisa
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.
The Gardener
Winner of the 2023 DISQUIET Prize for Poetry
I’ve been negotiating my fears with speaking.
After a life of being half-heard;
after half a life of being unheard, I now think of the chaos
I avoided in this abstinence. In some stories Jesus
is not the fool, keeping himself
to himself, knowing only God knows
Drifting
Not the circus of constellations
rifled with shooting stars
from nights we slept by the river.