No I do not want everlasting life
to be condemned to forever here
on this wasted earth no merci messieurs
unlike the Struldbruggs hailed all the way
from the island-nation of Luggnagg
discovered at the end of Book Three
of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels
By NED BALBO
Because I still remember my mother’s scar,
six inches long, an inch wide, sunken gash
below her waist, forever unexplained.
Because the scar looked rushed, a knife’s quick work
closed with no time to lose. Because, watching
her dress, I felt both love and mystery,
questions evaded, others left unasked.
our truck gathers speed as we approach the hills of el valle and for
a few seconds i am in flight we accelerate embark the horizon’s
I’ve always written my poems
on borrowed paper and borrowed time
In the camps, as a child, journaling
by the fire, by whatever light I could find.
What do you want for your birthday?
My mother asked, knowing she didn’t have a dime.
Notebooks, ’ama, paper, and a pen.
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.
By JULIO PUENTE GARCÍA
Translated by JENNIFER ACKER, with thanks to Luis Herrera Bohórquez
Para Violante, en sus primeros meses
I met Jacinta in the migrant camp where we grew up. I remember that it was the beginning of June, a few days into the start of the harvest. At that time, Jacinta had lived for nine springs—she was two years younger than me—and for obvious reasons she still used her given last name, López del Campo. Those of us who saw her timidly climb the stairs and enter the last shack, which served as our classroom, with her butterfly notebook pressed to her chest and her gaze glued to her sun-toasted legs, never imagined that in less than ten years she’d be proclaimed the artistic heir to Joaquín Murrieta, a figure shrouded in dust but fondly remembered within the Mexican communities settled in the central lands of California.
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.
This piece is an excerpt from The Cemetery Boys, a novel in progress.
Sunday had arrived—Six days shalt thou labor, and do all thy work; but the seventh day is a Sabbath unto the Lord thy God—and brought with it a strong exhale that breezed over various labor camp sites of the San Joaquin Valley. Resourceful worshipers set up sanctified spaces and stretched borrowed tarps between sun-scorched oaks to contain the cool shade. The ground was covered in the white grime of harvest dust. The traveling priest presided in front of his truck’s flatbed, renovated to serve as an altar for Catholics, but for anyone, really, who had a righteous belief in divine intervention, joyous faith in a higher power.
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,
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