I will tell you a sad story: White people are moving away
From this city that has claimed my heart. They are running away
From my people. They are running away from all that keeps
Us poor. I want them to stay and fight. I want them
To stay and live with my people. We have chased them
Away. I want them to love the people who make the food
They love. We have chased them away—are you happy? Are you
Happy? And there are people waiting in line, spending
Their fortunes just for a chance to enter, waiting, just blocks
Away from where I sit, waiting to come over, waiting in Juárez
Just to cross the river, from China and India and all the nations
Of Africa and Central America and Asia. No poet, no engineer, no
Politician, no philosopher no artist, no novelist has ever
Dreamed a solution. I am tired of living in exile. I am tired
Of chasing others off the land.

- Benjamin Alire Saenz, more here.

What did your wife say when you told her you were going to attempt to smuggle your nephew into the country? She got very angry. What did she say? She said that is your problem. Is that all she said, she just got angry and said it’s your problem? She got angry and then she stopped talking. How do you and your wife feel now about what happened? She is under a lot of pressure and I am completely at fault. If you are given another chance to keep your permanent residency, what would you do if another family member came begging you to help them cross? I would reject them. I would push them to one side.





(The rest of today's post was also suppressed.)

Why would you have been afraid to mention your sexuality and health status first on the application and then in the interview with your brother-in-law and yet today you have stated all of these facts before the immigration judge and the family members present? I do not know.





(The rest of today's post was suppressed.)

Two snippets of conversation from a café in La Jolla:

1) I just remembered I voted for Reagan. (The woman is texting someone.) Oh, how do you spell Reagan?

2) Can’t talk now. My guru’s online.


A title:
Only Our Eyes To Cry With


A conclusion:
Sanity is parceled out to the victorious.

Now I am quietly waiting for
the catastrophe of my personality
to seem beautiful again,
and interesting, and modern.





(Thanks Mr. O'Hara.)

El tema de hoy será el problema de
los sustantivos que terminan en a
pero que son masculinos. Hay ciertas cosas
impredecibles del idioma y uno tiene que
estar al tanto. El mapa existe en las raíces
de las palabras. Veamos las raíces griegas,
o sea los origines griegos: el poema será
una especie de perdida. Unas erotemas:
¿el paradigma se rompe cada cuanto?
¿Avisa antes? Hay una gema pequeña
en medio del bosque. Otras anatemas
pueden ser de los dos géneros. Recién
aprendí que una cometa no es un cometa.
Si pongo aquí una coma, no caigo en un coma.
Por eso en mis poemas, evito el español,
lengua traicionera siempre te acecha.

Las ordenes contribuyen al orden
gramático. La radio distribuyó las
medidas del radio del círculo. Dame una
orden y yo te doy el radio. No la radio.
Ya me acordé. Es que la radio es un
acortamiento de difusora o difusión.
Y el radio es que antes tenía un receptor
que venía después y por eso el artículo.
El orden es masculino pero la orden
es femenina. El género gramático
no tiene nada que ver con el género sexual.
Hay un orden en el género más allá
de los genitales. Y eso me lo aprendí
con la ayuda de la Real Academía
y te lo pongo todo en este fracasado poema.

Rabid mockingbirds dive-bombing
into empty schoolyards and mechanic shops,
flying low through canyons of Chinese food and tortillas,
these rapid streaks of brown darting
around Friday dusk-ridden bodies and a man
on the sidewalk sweating soaked in a T-shirt
donated from the First Baptist Church.
Or are they bats pining for the sustaining bite
searching the remains of the stands and garbage
for something worth saving,
using their radar to hone in on the facts.
Or are they angered doves alighting from one roof
to another in the night mistaken for sinister
things when everywhere there is dancing music and
a tiny girl getting out of a maroon minivan in a pink skirt
saying bye to the driver, lunging forward toward the bright lights.
Passing through half streaks of half evening light,
I’m not sure I think I hear one yell:
You there, go home.

Everything around us is collapsing and here we are stuck on this island. Perhaps if we stopped talking to each other we would have fewer calamities. Perhaps there is a future in our collapse.

I am more incapable than the most incapable, unable to turn my head so that my ear can hear what my mouth is saying. No power to turn and listen and when I do or if I try inevitably this will not work out.

Flitting from one sedative to the next upper, the combination is perfect, it leaves the mind almost normal. A perfect balance this in-between state, this normality we can’t quite reach anymore.

Our conflict was a conflict written in history already, built into synapses and made of rage. These words I write are loaded with the force of what has already happened. Disabled syllables incapable of openness.

The priest taught me if someone was angry with me than I had done something wrong. Taught me to do everything I could to not allow that kind of conflict, to be meek and doubtful and also seething with rage all at the same impossible time.

If you would only stop crying and if you would only hold back, I could tell you that everything I do and everything I say is controlled by this foreign god, this demon who has stolen my body and will not give it back. I am still accountable.

When I wandered into this relationship, I was struck by the light of the afternoon, the way even gray highway overpasses seemed to shimmer and bloom at your side. Now I realize I had sucked all your energy into my glimmering. I stole it.

        The girl with a headband holding back her well-coiffed locks was screaming her way through a conversation at the other table, ruling over her family in the way pretty girls can rule over whole groups. With almost ten people at the table, it was a wonder she was the only one who seemed to be talking. A loud, nasal voice rising up over the meek voices of her grandmother, elderly aunts and assorted children and twenty-somethings. She was giving a long speech on the nature of love and the difficulty of betrayal. Seated a few tables away from her at the pozolería, I could make out little swatches of conversation, small bits that floated over from the table. Suddenly, one phrase stopped me, broke me into laughter, hunched me over as a I tried to squelch my laughter:
        “En el amor, no hay número.”
        Don’t worry, I don’t understand what it means either.

Español: Alguién me preguntó si voy a escribir textos en español. Les dije que sí.

Afrikaans: Lemand het my gevra of ek gaan skryf tekste in Spaans. Ek het gesê ja.

Haitian Kreyol: Yon moun mande m si m pral ekri tèks nan panyòl. Mwen te di wi.

Filipino: Isang tao asked ako kung ako ay isulat ang teksto sa Espanyol. I said yes.

Albanian: Dikush më pyeti nëse unë shkruaj tekstin në spanjisht. I tha po.

Vietnamese: Có người đã hỏi tôi nếu tôi viết văn bản trong tiếng Tây Ban Nha. Tôi nói có.

French: Quelqu'un m'a demandé si je écrire un texte en espagnol. J'ai dit oui.

English: Someone asked me if I write a text in Spanish. I said yes.

A sedentary person cannot judge a traveler, or at least, if they did try, they would end up judging the voyager the wrong way, because they could never conceive of happiness except in the form of a return. A rooted person is always heading back to the place where they started. This person’s trips are always circular.


Endnote: Is a sedentary person the same as a domestic person or a homebody or a rooted person? Are these synonyms? Can I force them to be synonyms? How about the use of they as a non-gendered singular pronoun? Could I get a ruling on that grammer there? I need an outside opinion. Is a voyager the same as a traveler? Are these two conceptual people really opposites? Back to the couch. Or the airplane?

Today there was a sick girl rushing out the door who needed help running errands that she had no time or energy to do alone.

Today the man who lives in the house at the corner of the alley and the street was looking up for a long time at the red expanse of the wall of his home, as if there were something there to be seen.

Today a two-block section of the street was closed because of repaving.

Today a new money-changing office on the block added an electronic sign that flashes out the exchange rates.

Today there was a man who sat in front of the convenience store with his sunglasses on as he mean-mugged the passers-by.

Today there was a woman who left cheap gum on the small ledge between the car window and the car door beneath it.

Today the cable company’s entire system for receiving payments crashed all over the city, forcing the women who work there to document everything on carbon copy receipts.

Today there was a man arguing with the man making him his ceviche, something about the number of them or the price.

Today there was a woman who walked up behind the argumentative man, as if spying on him, like she wanted to intercede.

Today there was a dog with fleas insistently scratching on the screen door trying to get an invitation to enter.

Today there was a man in the street yelling, “Rudo.”

Today a repairman came to the three-story house next door where the strange white men live and called out, “Buenas tardes,” many a time as he knocked his screwdriver repetitively against the wooden gate.

Today there was a low-hum of a kind of drill in the distance, like a dentist drill but so much bigger and louder, filling the whole neighborhood with its squeal.

In general, nothing happens in contemporary life. If there is news, it appears in a virtual way on television or on the Internet. This news is assimilated quickly and immediately loses its newness. There is almost no possibility for surprise, since surprise has always already fallen back into the just-passed past.