Issue Four Contents

3 poems
by Maria Alyokhina
2 poems
by Simonas Bernotas
Fiction
by Andriy Bondar
2 poems
by Luis Chaves
Poetry
by Ramón García
2 poems
by Julia Guez
Poetry
by Salgado Maranhão
Photo Essay
by Josip Novakovich
A poem
by Catherine Tice
Fiction
by João Tordo
2 poems
by Samantha Zighelboim
Frogpondia
Poetry
by Ramón García
Ramón García is the author of The Chronicles (Red Hen Press, 2015), Other Countries (What Books Press, 2010) and Ricardo Valverde (University of Minnesota Press, 2013), He has published poetry in a variety of journals and anthologies including Best American Poetry 1996, Ambit, The Floating Borderlands: Twenty-Five Years of US-Hispanic Literature, Crab Orchard Review, Poetry Salzburg Review, Los Angeles Review, and Mandorla: New Writing from the Americas. He’s a Professor at California State University, Northridge and lives in Los Angeles.

News from Stockholm

The Poet at 16

Undocumented

Lessons

Buenos Aires

On the Train

Premature Epitaph

News from Stockholm

In another world Tranströmer has died. 
It snows in other countries, in other lives.
 
When a poet dies he doesn’t miss 
 The world much, or only misses a few things:
 Making love, the smiles of children, the ocean, 
 The moon, Haydn, the taste of mangos. 
 
Still, he’ll find their equivalent experiences
 Where he’s gone, far from us, in the presence of all we lack.
 
Tranströmer has died. It is raining in Sweden. 
 Here in the tropics of Central America, the 
 Pacific is colder than usual 
 As if the surf delivered waters originating in the North Sea. 


The Poet at 16

The televisions hum in all the rooms,
 Sitcom soundtrack laughter regulates the hours.
 Relatives come and go, ritual appearances.
 The rites of prayers and padre nuestros thread 
 The Sundays of the years.
 Mexico, the family’s Arcadia, is a tended nostalgia 
 A burdensome garden of memories.
 From my window, I see Mr. Thomas, the Vietnam veteran
 Washing and waxing his Ford pick-up truck several times a day.
 The car hood is a modernist sculpture reflecting the day’s glaring light. 
 
 Suburban lawns, repeated green rectangles of flatness repeating flatness. 
 The water sprinklers own the afternoon, rattling an unnoticed monotonous music. 
 In the uneasy company of crucifixes and the images of the virgen de Guadalupe
 On walls that cannot be anything other than home
 Family life is the All, the Supreme Mexicaness.
 
 At school I do my algebra and read Julius Caesar
 Inside of classrooms whose desks are occupied by wealthy Mormons 
 And the great grandchildren of the Okies. 
 I go to football games I have no interest in, 
 Hollywood movies and backyard parties with smuggled kegs of beer.
 In the pages of the high school yearbook I am smiling in the company of friends.
 Secretly, I’m a sleepwalker, groping for something that will wake me up
 But all I’ve found are imported records of The Smiths, Yesterday’s Bookstore 
 And back issues of the Advocate at the Stanislaus County Library. 
 My best friend Richie Likeke finds us girls,
 They let us finger them in condominiums absented of parents. 
 In the dark of my room at night, 
 I hoped that I would go to sleep and never wake up.
 
 The cities are remote, like dreams that have not happened.
 Emily Dickinson’s blurry blank face, like the Puritan snow of the East Coast
 Is alien, but her words are a remote wonder. 
 Shakespeare’s sonnets, a music that beckons and recedes.
 Sylvia Plath’s surrealist rage, Anne Sexton’s Brothers Grimm, Pasolini’s Rome…
 I make my way there, 
 A wary caller where perhaps I don’t belong. 
 
 Some day those words will be my home.

Undocumented

The children called “illegal” “alien”
 They too are Whitman’s children
 His descendants and claimants
 
 Their brown, elegantly awake eyes
 Have already forgotten the pueblos they came from
 The remote afternoon timelessness of a land they will 
 Never again be part of 
 
 In the midst of deprivation and banality
 Imposed wars, they will root old world flowers
 Name and rename them, recreate leaves
 
 With the transformed suns of loss Their hands reach toward themselves and others
 Joined in love and courted by death 
 In the country of night with its flag of stars
 
 Their children will play on lawns, school yards and baseball fields
 Not knowing that the grass was ever foreign

Lessons

Like money underneath a mattress
 The professor finishes another book, 
 Places it back on the bookcase. 
 Times of distrust and secret hoardings.
 Affection, tenderness—scarce currencies. 
 
 All the young men he comes across, 
 Lonely, restless, unfulfilled, 
 Are his ghosts, 
 Unconsciously enslaved to pleasure, or incurably isolated.
 
 Out in the city is the future, the dislocation of what will happen.
 Inside are the words and the music of apartness—the past.
 Memory is spending itself. 


Buenos Aires

At the zoo
 Borges’ tiger skulks behind bars 
 Bored and enraged
 At the Evita museum 
 Evita’s Dior dresses and picaninny dolls wait for her return
 
 Psychoanalysis 
 The demons of fashion
 Promise lands with hourly prices
 
 Some dreamed this Southern American land as Paris
 As an extension of Europe
 Dreams most successfully realized at the Recoleta cemetery
 
 Plastic surgery dreams
 They do come true
 
 One can believe in anything 
 Even falling in love or the glamour of poets committing suicide
 Even in the ghost of Che haunting 
 The soccer crotches of neurotic boys
 
 City of immigrants
 City of monuments
 Rooted to the elsewhere of the world 


On the Train

After Wasco, a young man just let out of one of the jails 
 In the depressed towns between Barkersfield and Fresno
 Asks to borrow my cell phone.
 A white carton box in the seat next to his holds all that is his. 
 He’s a character out of a fairy tale in which the forest has been replaced
 By the depths of some ghetto in the Southland. 
 He has the eyes of a scared child 
 In which innocence is running amok.
 Three days later I get a call from an unrecognized number. 
 It’s his brother, who didn’t pick up his call. 
 The man’s name, I find out, was Joe. 


Premature Epitaph

A corrupt world can keep its ambition. 
 For others glory, admiring attention, 
 The adoration of strangers. 
 I practiced the art of friendship,
 And a few decent people cared deeply for me. 
 
 Say I knew love, for a very short time, 
 But I pity those who knew less 
 For much longer, for their whole lives.
 
 I went here and there, without guide or destination, 
 Because I had to escape
 The sirens of a loving home 
 The soothing ones, whose song was comforting, 
 But murderously stifling.
 
 Say I was not just Odysseus, but also Penelope, 
 And that while I was searching I was also waiting. 
 That exile became my condition 
 That there was no other way to live
 In an Ithaca destroyed before I was born. 

Ramón García is the author of The Chronicles (Red Hen Press, 2015), Other Countries (What Books Press, 2010) and Ricardo Valverde (University of Minnesota Press, 2013), He has published poetry in a variety of journals and anthologies including Best American Poetry 1996, Ambit, The Floating Borderlands: Twenty-Five Years of US-Hispanic Literature, Crab Orchard Review, Poetry Salzburg Review, Los Angeles Review, and Mandorla: New Writing from the Americas. He’s a Professor at California State University, Northridge and lives in Los Angeles.