Yesterday, the sunshine made the air glow, poem by Jimmy Santiago Baca

[Yesterday, the sunshine made the air glow] (Excerpt)
by Jimmy Santiago Baca 

Yesterday, the sunshine made the air glow
pushing me like a sixteen-year-old
to toss my shirt off, and run along the river shore,
splashing in the water, wading out to the reeds,
my heart an ancient Yaki drum
and I believed,
more than believed,
the air beneath trees was female blue dancers
I approached, and there in the dry leaves, in the crisp twigs,
I turned softly as if dancing with a blue woman made of air,
sunlight,
in shrub-weed skirts.
I knew the dance that would please the Gods,
I knew the dance that would make the river water
smile glistening ever silvering,
I knew the dance steps that praised my ancestors…

…Read “Yesterday…” by Jimmy Santiago Baca in its entirety at poetryfoundation.org.

IMAGE: “Dance” by Gun Legler. Prints available at fineartamerica.com.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Born in 1952 in Santa Fe, New Mexico, of Chicano and Apache descent, Jimmy Santiago Baca was abandoned by his parents and at 13 ran away from the orphanage where his grandmother had placed him. He was convicted on drug charges in 1973 and spent five years in prison. There, he learned to read and began writing poetry. His semiautobiographical novel in verse, Martin and Meditations on the South Valley (1987), received the 1988 Before Columbus Foundation’s American Book Award in 1989. In addition to over a dozen books of poetry, he has published memoirs, essays, stories, and a screenplay, Bound by Honor (1993), which was made into a feature-length film directed by Taylor Hackford. Baca’s poetry titles include Healing Earthquakes (2001), C-Train & 13 Mexicans (2002), Winter Poems Along the Rio Grande (2004), and Spring Poems Along the Rio Grande (2007). Baca has received a Pushcart Prize and the Hispanic Heritage Award for Literature. His memoir, A Place to Stand (2001), garnered the International Prize. In 2006, Baca was awarded the Cornelius P. Turner Award, which honors GED graduates who have made “outstanding contributions” in areas such as education, justice, and social welfare. For more than 30 years, Baca has conducted writing workshops in prisons, libraries, and universities across the country. In 2004, he launched Cedar Tree, a literary nonprofit designed to provide writing workshops, training, and outreach programs for at-risk youth, prisoners and ex-prisoners, and disadvantaged communities. Baca holds a BA in English and an honorary PhD in literature from the University of New Mexico.

Misfit Magazine reviews Daniel Romo poetry collections

Congratulations to Daniel Romo, author of the poetry collection Romancing Gravity (Silver Birch Press, 2013) on the great review of his chapbook (and previous collection, When Kerosene’s Involved) at misfitmagazine.net. The review appears below.

Growing up as a decidedly Not chulo type in Southern California was not a pleasant experience for Romo.  A self-described geeky, skinning kid, shy around girls, awkward, though plucky at sports, a decidedly not Macho, he somehow manages to view his upbringing with humor and panache.  Now a teacher and a voluminous writer, as these two collections show (Kerosene is well over 200 pages of concise prose poems, while Romancing is a mere 60 odd pages of free verse). Romo’s is a voice and point of view, that grows on you the more you read.  He is both empathetic and clear eyed, but not overly sentimental. In short, Romo is the kind of role model you could  safely entrust your children with, knowing they he remembers the pitfalls of youth and what is necessary, now, to move on with life.” misfitmagazine.net

Revision, poem by Daniel Romo

REVISION
by Daniel Romo

           Let’s say we’re seahorses. Let’s say our forgotten birthday candles
have melted into coral. Let’s say the coral is forgotten, too.
         Let’s say the water is repetition. It is high tide. We have washed ashore.
The children scoop us up with plastic shovels.
                       They drop us into half-filled buckets of sandy water
                               hoping to revive us.
Their mothers convince them to throw us back. Our bodies turn to foam.
                                                               We are already dead.
 
Let’s say we’re notorious bank robbers planning our heist from our hideout. 
                            Let’s say our masks are big yellow happy faces.
                            Let’s say we are bad men.
                            Our mothers have written us letters trying to convince us
                                                             to turn ourselves in.
      We rip them up and smile. We were always disobedient children.
                        Let’s say we’re cops who have been tipped off,
                        about to raid the hideout.
                        Let’s say our guns are loaded, and our laughs are loud.
                     
  Let’s say we’re liars and none of this happened.
            Let’s say we were seahorses.
Let’s say our birthdays were never celebrated.
                       Let’s say we’ve crossed out those times in our lives.
                                    
  Let’s say we’re convenient rough drafts.    

…”Revision” appears in the Silver Birch Press release Romancing Gravity, a collection of poems by Daniel Romo, available at Amazon.com.

Stickball, poem by Daniel Romo

STICKBALL
by Daniel Romo

Summers were a never-ending 7th inning,
and games stretched into the next day
when the sun no longer lit the cul-de-sac.

My brother’s knuckleball was an
experiment in flight pattern,
a taunting array of speculation:

                   juking and jutting,
       a hovering slow-dance
                                 inventing new steps
the batter could never learn.

My fastball was a humming blur of rocket science.

And whoever made contact deserved to
commandeer the moon.

The neighborhood kids were filler.

Portuguese soccer-playing
perpetual strikeout victims
always stuck out in right field,
because they were more skilled with their feet
than with their hands.

Today it’s the bottom of the 9th inning.
Two outs.

And we are dreamers posing as fathers
reminding our own children,
“Point your toe to the target.
Keep your elbow up.
And follow through on the pitch.”

Today I remember belting an old tennis ball
over the neighbor’s roof
into his backyard,
gliding around makeshift bases
with glorious fists raised
as if God was pulling our hands. 

PHOTO: “Stickball equipment” by Debbie Dell, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

“Stickball” appears in Daniel Romo‘s poetry collection ROMANCING GRAVITY, available at Amazon.com.

Romancing Gravity, poems by Daniel Romo

In May 2013, Silver Birch Press released ROMANCING GRAVITY, a collection of poems by Daniel Romo. The poems in ROMANCING GRAVITY navigate through worlds (and words) nestled in nostalgia, rooted in the uncanny, and primed with pain. Striking language and rich images frame gangbangers, classrooms, and family, while trying to carry the burdens that come with being alive. These are poems of baseball and breathing, of heaven and healing. The speakers of the poems wander from one world and into the next, looking down to find their footing, and looking up for proof that they exist.

FROM THE BACK COVER: 

“In ROMANCING GRAVITY Daniel Romo has written a memoir in poetry. It is the poetry of growing up in Southern California, of childhood games and fear, of adolescent dreams and braggadocio, and a young man’s coming into his own as a man and a poet. There are echoes of popular culture and the poems dance to the beat of an urban pulse. There are hallucinatory prose poems and sometimes the speaker sounds like an Old Testament prophet disguised as a homeless man, calling down curses on our decadent world. Lost children wave to us from the floor of the ocean. Do they wave in greeting or are they taking their leave? Either way, the reader waves back, the reader wants to dance or say ‘Yes!’ to these marvelous poems.” Richard Garcia, author of The Persistence of Objects

“Daniel Romo’s ROMANCING GRAVITY is a terrific collection—at once edgy, comical, and big-hearted. I was immediately drawn to his streetwise grit, his luminous vision of urban America. These are poems that swagger, that ‘boom boom sound’ and leave your ears ringing.” David Hernandez, author of Hoodwinked

“Daniel Romo finds surprising lyricism in school classrooms, TV shows, and yard sales in his southern California neighborhoods. Celebratory, irreverent, and deeply personal, the poems in ROMANCING GRAVITY capture the quotidian in stunning ways and reveal what keeps us earthbound.” Molly Bendall, author of Under the Quick

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Daniel Romo is the author of When Kerosene’s Involved (Black Coffee Press, 2013 — an updated version scheduled for a 2014 release by Mojave River Press & Review). His poetry and photography can be found in the Los Angeles Review, Gargoyle, MiPOesias, Yemassee, Hobart, and elsewhere. He holds an MFA from Queens University of Charlotte and teaches creative writing. He lives in Long Beach, California. More of his writing can be found at danielromo.net.

Find ROMANCING GRAVITY at Amazon.com. For this inspired collection, Silver Birch Press has nominated Daniel Romo for a 2013 Pushcart Prize.

Diluvian Dream, poem by Wilmer Mills

DILUVIAN DREAM
by Wilmer Mills

All afternoon I walk behind the mower,
Imagining, though paradoxically,
That even though the grass is getting lower,
What I have cut is like a rising sea;
The parts I haven’t cut, with every pass,
Resemble real geography, a map,
A shrinking island continent of grass
Where shoreline vanishes with every lap.

At last, the noise and smell of gasoline
Dispel my dream. What sea? Peninsulas?
They were the lands my inner child had seen,
Their little Yucatáns and Floridas.

But when I’m finished, and Yard goes back to Lawn,
I can’t help thinking that a world is gone.

Source: Poetry (July/August 2013).

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: The son of agricultural missionaries, poet Wilmer Mills (b.1969) grew up in Brazil and Louisiana. Mills earned both a BA and MA in theology from the University of the South, and worked at a variety of jobs during his life including carpenter, sawmill operator, baker, farmer, and whitewater raft guide. He also served as the Kenan Visiting Writer at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Acclaimed as a careful practitioner of form and meter, Mills received praise for the dramatic monologues of his first book, Light for the Orphans (2002). His poems were published in various journals, including New Criterion, Poetry, New Republic, Hudson Review, and Shenandoah. With his wife and two children, Mills lived and worked in Sewanee, Tennessee, in a house he built himself. He died in 2011. (Source: poetryfoundation.org.)

Home, poem by Bruce Weigl

HOME
by Bruce Weigl

I didn’t know I was grateful
            for such late-autumn
                        bent-up cornfields
 
yellow in the after-harvest
            sun before the
                        cold plow turns it all over
 
into never.
            I didn’t know
                        I would enter this music
 
that translates the world
            back into dirt fields
                        that have always called to me
 
as if I were a thing
            come from the dirt,
                        like a tuber,
 
or like a needful boy. End
            Lonely days, I believe. End the exiled
                         and unraveling strangeness. 

“Home” appears in Bruce Weigl’s collection The Unraveling Strangeness by Bruce Weigl, published by Grove/Atlantic. Copyright © 2003 by Bruce Weigl. All rights reserved.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Bruce Weigl served in Vietnam in 1967 and 1968 and was awarded a Bronze Star. His first full-length collection of poems was published in 1979. He has received two Pushcart Prizes, a Patterson Poetry Prize, and a Yaddo Foundation Fellowship. Weigl was awarded the Bread Loaf Fellowship in Poetry in 1981 and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1988. He was also nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in 1988 for Song of Napalm.

Photo: “After the corn harvest” by Cindy Dietz, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Revision, poem by Daniel Romo

REVISION
by Daniel Romo

           Let’s say we’re seahorses. Let’s say our forgotten birthday candles
have melted into coral. Let’s say the coral is forgotten, too.
         Let’s say the water is repetition. It is high tide. We have washed ashore.
The children scoop us up with plastic shovels.
                       They drop us into half-filled buckets of sandy water
                               hoping to revive us.
Their mothers convince them to throw us back. Our bodies turn to foam.
                                                               We are already dead.
 
Let’s say we’re notorious bank robbers planning our heist from our hideout. 
                            Let’s say our masks are big yellow happy faces.
                            Let’s say we are bad men.
                            Our mothers have written us letters trying to convince us
                                                             to turn ourselves in.
      We rip them up and smile. We were always disobedient children.
                        Let’s say we’re cops who have been tipped off,
                        about to raid the hideout.
                        Let’s say our guns are loaded, and our laughs are loud.
                     
  Let’s say we’re liars and none of this happened.
            Let’s say we were seahorses.
Let’s say our birthdays were never celebrated.
                       Let’s say we’ve crossed out those times in our lives.
                                    
  Let’s say we’re convenient rough drafts.    

…”Revision” appears in the Silver Birch Press release Romancing Gravity, a collection of poems by Daniel Romo, available at Amazon.com.

The Desert Rancher on Sunday, poem by Jeffrey C. Alfier

THE DESERT RANCHER ON SUNDAY
by Jeffrey Alfier

Winds release clouds from the tread of drifting
but buoy the arcs of loitering hawks.
 
It’s so quiet he swears he hears sunlight,
Chihuahuan sage blossoming in clusters.
 
Where his footfalls impel a warbler’s flight,
distant church bells summon their own echoes.
 
He kneels, presses palms to parched tractor ruts
that angle off into wind-runneled fields.
 
Thin soil keeps him for another season,
the ground made of nothing his hands won’t hold.

…”The Desert Rancher on Sunday” appears in the Silver Birch Press release The Wolf Yearling, a collection of poems by Jeffrey C. Alfier, available at Amazon.com.

Joy, poem by Chris Forhan

JOY
by Chris Forhan

It seized me—never mind the circumstance: sudden
scent in the breeze like cinnamon, sun silvering
a roof as the unicycle parade began—it seized me
 
as sickness does, wholly, with no mercy,
all of my body obeisant to its law as though none of it
were mine, finally: not the joy or the body.

…”Joy” appears in the Silver Birch Press release Ransack and Dance, a collection of poems by Chris Forhan, available at Amazon.com.