Millicent Borges Accardi

Carrying Someone You’d not Seen in 15 Years

The body goes light,           as if keeping            a piece of paper,
soft         and              awkward in your           arms.
There is a pulse         and so you              continue.
They              are without           words or sounds.
You imagine calling          a hospital                  and screaming
into the phone at the ER  nurse           to put              your mother
on the other end.  It is night time, isn’t it
always? And               you are in a hotel           in New York
City, two days            past           Valentine’s, and
one day         past the anniversary,           the first             year
your parents did not           dance                around the
room,            your mother        hovering            over your
Father’s shoes            as if she          were                                            already.

 


Millicent Borges Accardi, a Portuguese-American writer, is the author of three poetry books, most recently Only More So (Salmon Poetry). Her awards include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), CantoMundo, the California Arts Council, Yaddo, Fundação Luso-Americana, and Barbara Deming Foundation.

 

 BACK TO ISSUE

 BACK TO FOLIO

Ruth Irupé Sanabria

Venn Stardust

You see what she does not see.
You see through the snow
an abandoned nest
nestled in the heart 
of the thorny red 
barberry.

Nowhere and everywhere in this town, all day, on the wires
between luck and calamity, the mockingbirds echo-shadow:
siren, horn, and the litany of other shit they hear.
One day, you’ll know why

but for now, step outside, no longer holding my hand -
see past the voids and repetitions,
past the cracked blue shells and blood orange yolk
all on our stoops, all on our sidewalk.

Regardless of the analysis your English teacher posits
about mockingbird metaphors as she looks at you, warmly;
regardless of how, in the a⋂b intersection of her wild venn diagrams, 
she writes “separation of children from their mothers” and looks at you - warmly, 

hide the nests and hold flat the water. See all the sheets.
What did the president say?
Notice how some teachers don’t notice the very room is breathing.
You did not come here to teach her anything, nor did the mockingbirds.
No one gives away the songs of their hearts.
And you are not ornament inoffensive. 
Hear what is.  Remember what you can see. 


Ruth Irupé Sanabria, a 2018 CantoMundo fellow, has published two collections of poetry The Strange House Testifies and Beasts Behave in Foreign Land. Her poems also appear in What Saves Us: Poems of Empathy and Outrage in the Age of Trump and Women of Resistance: Poems for a New Feminism, 

 

 BACK TO ISSUE

 BACK TO FOLIO

Roberto F. Santiago

Portrait of Petroklos 

             after Ron Prigat’s “Ken Looking at Caravaggio”

The shadow cast from a single lantern is not biblical,
Though it is indistinguishable in proportion. He is
A symphony exploding slowly at first, in shifts &silently.
A meticulously petalled
crescendo, brimming with
Vibration. H
is breath, a plié stolen from the blackness of
Caravaggio; a m
erlot-lipped recitation of Cavafy under
Black lace. The black of scriptures that bleed when you touch
Them. Silhouette
as the naked black of an observer on his
Neck. His eyes glister gold-as-riverlight, an expression
Old as the earliest form of wonderment. A pleasury,
A seance, gossamer-white flamelicked and split
Up the center. His vanillin abounds. A furrow beneath
Mourning. A psalm of Achilles’ horses. On his brow,
a covenant with any creator willing to listen.


Roberto F. Santiago is the author of Angel Park (2015)—a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award in Poetry—and LIKE SUGAR (Nomadic, 2020). He received an MFA from Rutgers and MSW from UC Berkeley. Recent work appears in Apogee, Foglifter, and The Ninth Letter. Roberto lives in San Francisco.

 

 BACK TO ISSUE

 BACK TO FOLIO

Peggy Robles-Alvarado

When Tía Teaches You How To Keep Your Man 

She says
Men only need two things: 
La comida y el culo

between drags of a Newport cigarette that balances 
casually between fingertips knowing everything
in a country foreign to your touch is temporary, always 
trying to eat but never fed to satisfaction  

Tía:
An ephemeral stream that feared anything outside her 
5 block borrowed country, her section 8 sky greyed by
the barely-there rays of a New York City sun that she 
could never imagine warming  her childhood home in 
Santiago, that sphere of fire dulled among the rooftops
couldn’t bronze her skin even in summer, she laughed, 
bragged about her stove having more passion than Helios 
himself, cursed a coñaso at  the impotence of small Gods 
in this great city that watched newly arrived Cibaeños 
and Dominican- Yorks dance bachata to the same rhythm 
of a new world caught in their cold smiles    

She licked the sweat beading off her lover's brow who 
married her cousin for papers, pursed her lips the same way 
she had done when she arrived carrying an avocado seed 
in her mouth past customs; No one cared to hear her 
voice anyway

Mothering was as foreign as English but she continued to 
summon her womb, pushing forth the weight of five mouths 
her hands couldn’t quiet,  their bellies tied to her own empty,
bottle after bottle, first milk then water, lover after lover, first 
wind gust then ghost    

No one wanted her fracture, her undone seams of a body 
with too much to say and nothing but a fist to say it with 
Men were the only animals she couldn't slaughter in her two 
bedroom apartment where live poultry met its end on the  
kitchen counter every Christmas, so she held their throats 
during sex, bucking to the pulse of carotid arteries, her spine  
singing perico ripiao, the warmth of his jaw caught in her 
fingernails, reminded her of eating limoncillos en la marquesina 
of Abuela’s casita, the juice marking a slow sway down her chin 

Tía: 
always hungry, always looking to be fed  
cooked enough to feed all the married men in 
her building, knowing there are three ways into this 
country- water, wind and wound


Peggy Robles-Alvarado is Pushcart Prize nominee, CantoMundo Fellow, and an International Latino Book Award winner. As a tenured educator with an MFA in Performance Studies, she authored Conversations with My Skin (2011), Homage to the Warrior Women (2012) and curated The Abuela Stories Project (2016).  Find her @ Robleswrites.com.

 

 BACK TO ISSUE

 BACK TO FOLIO