FROM: Our Californa

Contested ground I live on
roots thousands of years old
severed,
but not erased.

Los Ángeles
invented a story it tells the world,
that its residents
are rootless. There is no
there there.

Yet, I was born on this land,
raised in its soil,
feet rooted
in its dirt.

Your legacy hidden beneath myth making
turned stereotypes turned clichés,
inventing a palatable history,
building wealth,
power,
by dividing,
confining,
ignoring.

Peaceful Tongva made slaves
by the Spanish. The LGBTQIA
rights movement began
at the Black Cat Tavern in Silver Lake.
Japanese Americans waiting in line
at the corner of Venice and Lincoln
to be processed, then
sent to internment camps.
Civil uprisings in 1965,
1992.

My whole life
I’ve walked on your contested land.
Your myths unraveling
bit by bit
as we slowly confront
our true selves.

FROM: Compulsive Reader

Poet Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo is a writer of place. A poet whose perspective stems from her hometown of San Gabriel and the San Gabriel Valley, out into the rest of the world. From a city with a deep traumatic history tied up in the colonialism and white supremacy of the San Gabriel Mission.

It’s a battle site, was one of the largest and wealthiest of California’s 21 missions, where the Spanish Franciscans enslaved the local Tongva natives, raped their women and herded Tongva together in large groups, where sanitation was wretched.

The San Gabriel Mission is just one of the many battle sites that make up Bermejo’s new poetry collection Incantation: Love Poems for Battle Sites, exploring the internal and external concerns about the current state of fear and chaos in America and how past unresolved fear and chaos can still haunt us. She underlies these poems with the same concern that ran directly through her debut Posada: Offerings of Witness and Refuge, finding home.

Incantation opens with “One Sweet Day: To Do List for the First Day of Spring,” functioning as the book’s introduction. Already there is a battle site, both personal and societal. Read Rest of Review Here

FROM: The Journal of Radical Wonder

I was alone in the courtyard
of a retirement community
in Riverside.
Bald, gray, silver haired geriatrics,
skin pock marked with age spots
and skin tags,
reminded me of my great uncles.
Of Sun City, Arizona.
My friend Amanda
in the concert band
was about to serenade
these people I’d one day look like,
whose lives I couldn’t fathom.

I didn’t see Amanda
before the crowd stood
and the national anthem encouraged
a murmur of off key singing. I
stood too,
having been taught
that’s what you do.
To unknowingly,
unquestioningly,
respect the country,
to give thanks.
An obligation I was
beginning to see
the fallacy of.

In the moments between,
an old lady, an air of certainty
to her movements,
stopped in front of me.
“Excuse me young man. I
noticed you did not put your hand
over your heart just now.”

I didn’t speak.
I didn’t look her in the eyes.
I wanted to find Amanda
on stage.

“You might have seen
that everyone else had their hands
over their hearts. That’s because
they respect the national anthem.
Young man,
are you listening to me?”

I remained quiet.
Didn’t want to erupt in anger —
the concert to start any second —
to feed into her agenda.

“Do you understand me?
Do you speak English?
Maybe you’re not from here.
But when you’re in America,
you show it the respect it deserves.
You’re lucky you get to be protected
by its freedoms while you’re here.”

My stomach clinched.
Thoughts were stuck,
raced into an unnerving nothingness,
like the eye of a hurricane.
Were people looking at me?

Amanda was the only person I knew.
My birth place, Los Ángeles,
an hour away.

“I don’t know how they do it in your country,
but here we respect the flag.”

The old woman left.

I felt exposed.

I tugged at my collar
attempting to straighten my t-shirt,
then put my hands in my pockets.
I picked at my cuticles.
Were people looking at me?
My body drew in.

I wanted to get lost in the concert,
but my stuck thoughts lingered:
Maybe you’re not from here.
I’m not from here?

As the first notes filled the courtyard
my thoughts and feelings remained at an unnerving impasse.

Yet,
what I knew
was one day,
I’d look like them.

Cynthia Guardado explores the inherited past of her Salvadorian roots in Cenizas

FROM: Cultural Daily

For poet and professor Cynthia Guardado, family, El Salvador and her Salvadorian American identity plays huge roles in her life. It began before she was born in 1984, when her parents fled the country’s brutal civil war as undocumented refugees and made their way to Los Ángeles. That put borders and thousands of miles between them and their cantón—Buena Vista—the land of their ancestors.

Guardado was two when her father wanted his daughters to be connected to family, to Buena Vista and El Salvador, and still undocumented, took his daughters back to meet their great-grandmother, Momma Juana. To make El Salvador real, despite the dangers of the civil war, and not to hold some distant, abstract importance. Ever since, Guardado has repeatedly returned to her homeland.

*****

The importance El Salvador and family play in Guardado’s life, is first seen in her debut collection Endeavor (World Stage Press, 2017) in a handful of heavy, personal, heartfelt poems in a collection about the harsh reality of trauma against women of color in America. In these poems—about an undocumented cousin brutally murdered, how violence in one country still haunts her in the other, the strain physical distance puts on a family, generational trauma—Guardado is already focused on how family and herself, personally, deal with the aftermath of the violence they encounter instead of depicting their traumatic violence as a way to assuage readers’ complicity in ignoring the marginalized group’s contextualized reality. This gives these poems a much-needed alternate point of view that invests readers deeper into who these people are and what El Salvador is, once the cameras are gone.

However, the poems in Guadardo’s second collection, Cenizas (University of Arizona Press, 2022), are more effective in discussing the inherited past of a family and country, than the handful of poems from Endeavor that focus more on the violence El Salvador and her family have endured through a less nuanced lens. Read Rest of Review Here

A Little Told L.Á. Perspective

FROM: Cultural Daily

It All Comes Down to This, a middle-grade novel by Karen English, begins with class privilege. “I saw [Mrs. Baylor hauling] herself heavily up the hill,” says 12-year-old Sophie, the narrator, looking out her den window. Sophie’s mother is interviewing housekeepers and this Black woman, Sophie can see, “resented that the hill was steep.” Sophie’s family has recently moved into this two-story house adjacent to the Baldwin Hills. It’s 1965. Los Ángeles. The city and country are beginning to change.

At the outset, the reader learns that Sophie and her family are Black when Sophie describes her mother as having “a Dorothy Dandrige kind of beauty.” Then Sophie introduces brief backstory, saying her family used to live “on Sixth Avenue near Adams,” a neighborhood that’s historically Black. Now, they are the first Black family integrating the upper middle class white neighborhood of View Park, a neighborhood that would evolve into one for wealthy Blacks.

*****

Sophie’s family is already economically privileged because her father’s a lawyer and her mother’s an art gallery curator. These are two high-powered, intellectually demanding, time-consuming, white-collar jobs, making them a rare Black family to have acquired wealth. Sophie’s mother therefore quickly hires the disapproving housekeeper Mrs. Baylor, English briefly mentioning she’s a Jamaican immigrant. English divulges such character-building facts by keeping them appropriately concise, like when Sophie notices Mrs. Baylor’s “…odd scar on her wrist.” English is not interrupting the flow of the narrative to explain the information, which prevents her from talking down to her young readers.

However, from the beginning, Sophie comparing her mother to Dorothy Dandridge indicates why it was easier for her family to acquire wealth and privilege than for the vast majority of Blacks: her mother’s shared light skin. She could pass. Sophie’s at the age where she begins to learn and understand this skin privilege: colorism. Read Rest of Review Here

FROM: Compulsive Reader

Reviewed by Brian Dunlap

Navigating With(out) Instruments
by traci kato-kiriyama
The Accomplices/Writ Large Press
December 2021, Paperback, 264 pages, ISBN-13: ‏978-1951628000

In Navigating With(out) Instruments, artist and activist traci kato-kiriyama opens their book of poems, micro essays, and notes to self, with a poem titled “Warning.” It repeats the same sentence six times creating a haunting echo: “warning/a book/of/poetry/is/a/trigger.” Before the book officially begins, the reader knows their poetic philosophy, that poetry’s to confront the hardest truths, personal, political, racial, communal, and familial.

Immediately, in section one titled “ICON 1: Have Abandoned Plane, Walking in this Direction,” the book inhabits this philosophy to confront. kato-kiriyama has reached her 30s, and it’s the time in a woman’s life to have children before it’s too late. That’s still society’s expectation, that women are nurturers to others, not autonomous beings.

It begins with kato-kiriyama’s decision not to have kids, that they make clear they are chronicling their nontraditional path in life. By pushing back against society’s bombardment of parental images—“stop sending paper infants to my doorbell…//cease your tapping/we’re a house of cats,” in the poem “My Periodic Wavering On Pregnancy, circa my 30-something years”—the reader sees a woman of color determined to make her own life, not have it made for her.

This notion expands, as kato-kiriyama ponders in the set of Notes To…, at the end of “ICON 1,” if the memory of the individual and their community can “be passed on outside of the vessel of/DNA.” If so, can the individual/kato-kiriyama, who doesn’t have kids, create a “a pan-generational consciousness/through the past, present, and future in concert with each/other,” if not expressed? kato-kiriyama makes a convincing argument in the negative, as they explicitly express their pan-generational consciousness throughout. Read Rest of Review Here

FROM: Reimagine America: an anthology for the future

I am one of you,
family fought in the Revolution,
relatives immigrated
from Scotland and Germany.
My father’s side
owned a slave,
Jerry, seven
years old.

I am one of you.
After I got pulled
over for missing a stop sign
in Moreno Valley—
traveling with two Latino
friends, Jose and Mesa—
the cop asked
half joking,
“Are you safe?”
Did I know them?
They hadn’t kidnapped me
had they?

I am one of you.

I am one of you
only in appearance. Seen too many
innocent black males
die,
watch you rip
brown four-year-old migrant
children from their
parents, use the Devil’s tongue
to spit your rhetoric:
these detained “illegal” children
do not require soap,
toothbrushes,
even beds,
to accept you actually
believe
“All men are created equal.”

I am not like you
as my eyes reveal a world
in vibrant color.

These people
shape the landscape
of my home. Grab agency
from those
intent to stomp it out. Rrelentlessness
I can taste in each bite
of Ban Mi, feel in each
turn of phrase spoken
at a reading,
in deep conversations our friendships
have afforded us.

Only in appearance
am I one of you.

FROM: Tropics of Meta

My dad and I stand in front of a plaque set in stone. Mexican fan palms tower on either side, sand at their base cordoned off by concrete. Families walk by distracted by conversations or by keeping an eye on their own children. Rollerbladers and bicyclists glide across the bike path, dodge pedestrians strolling in their way.

No one pauses to read the plaque’s words. I don’t see anyone glance over.

The first and biggest words read in capital letters: “THE INK WELL.” And underneath: “A place of celebration and pain…an important gathering place for African Americans long after racial restrictions on public beaches were abandoned in 1927…they encountered less racial harassment [here] than at other Southland beaches…”[1]

We scan the wide expanse of footprint-laden sand. A sky blue lifeguard tower keeps watch near the horizon, a line of dot-sized sunbathers and recovering swimmers extending from either side. Volleyball nets are strung above the granules and Latinos relax on the short concrete divider between the sand and bike path. Read Rest of Article Here

FROM: Lit Pub

NOTE: My Latest Book Review

Let the Buzzards Eat Me Whole by L.A. poet Ingrid M. Calderón-Collins, comes at you raw, unapologetic, heavy. From the first three lines of this poetic memoir, you know she’s going to be honest. This is her immigrant story and as she makes clear, she is in control of her own narrative.

I am 40,
I have saggy tits, white pubes and a story
to tell…

It’s evident Calderón-Collins will tell the reader the truth about herself, the entire truth, as she’s “lied my way through life not only/to others, but also mostly to myself.” This is in the untitled Introduction where she explains the essential reason for writing the book, for replacing the harmful “magick,” of making and portraying herself as someone she’s not, to a healthy, honest, truthful “magick,” “a magick that loved me back,” to make clear that her trauma did happen, that it’s not dismissible and to make clear the recursive process she uses to build a healthy life to avoid the setbacks trauma brings.

*

Ingrid M. Calderón-Collins was born in El Salvador in 1980, at the outbreak of the civil war between the government and a coalition of left-wing military groups. It was a time of unrest and violence, prompted by socioeconomic inequality, where “men/[walked] around/in dirty green uniforms,” where “I’d hear shots go off.” At the same time she fought her own personal war, the kind she said that, “lived/in dark houses.” The sexual abuse began at age four when Don Chepe and his wife were left in charge. Read Rest of Book Review Here