University of Colorado, Boulder
CU Scholar
English Graduate Theses & Dissertations
Spring 1-1-2014
Beast Meridian
Vanessa Angelica Villarreal
University of Colorado at Boulder, [email protected]
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Commons, and the Poetry Commons
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Villarreal, Vanessa Angelica, "Beast Meridian" (2014). English Graduate Theses & Dissertations. 58.
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English
BEAST MERIDIAN
by
VANESSA ANGELICA VILLARREAL
B.A., University of Houston, 2011
A thesis submitted to the
Faculty of the Graduate School of the
University of Colorado in partial fulfillment
of the requirement for the degree of
Master of Fine Arts
Department of English
2014
This thesis entitled:
BEAST MERIDIAN
written by VANESSA ANGELICA VILLARREAL
has been approved for the Department of English
MARCIA DOUGLAS
RUTH ELLEN KOCHER
Date
The final copy of this thesis has been examined by the signatories, and we
Find that both the content and the form meet acceptable presentation standards
Of scholarly work in the above mentioned discipline.
Villarreal, Vanessa Angelica (MFA, English Creative Writing)
Beast Meridian
Thesis directed by Associate Professor Marcia Douglas
Part myth, part autobiographical essay, part poetry, part bestiary, this collection of
prose/poems interrogates the Mexican immigrant condition by imagining it as a physical space—a
dark, liminal forest, where Mexican immigrants have been reduced to animals to exist in a kind of
purgatory. The Beast Meridian is a line and a condition that confines the animals and the speaker,
Alma, to their animal form in a cursed forest shadowland, which renders the animals invisible to
their former life and to the rest of the world. Each animal narrates from behind the Beast Meridian,
a border which, if crossed, could transfigure these animals back into their human form, but each
attempt to cross further curses them, relegating them to deeper darkness and obscurity. The cursed
forest these animals inhabit is at once a metaphor for depression, suicide, poverty, and the reality of
racism and oppression toward Mexican immigrants in the US, which renders them invisible while
they are stripped of their humanity, treated as animals and pests to be exterminated, worked like
beasts of burden, consigned to hard labor in long shifts behind the scenes, and bound to the
shadows of society.
iii
“Por la mujer de mi raza
hablará el espiritu.” —Gloria Anzaldúa
para mi familia, especialmente a aquellos que han sacrificado tanto para que yo pueda estar aquí,
y sobre todo para Angelica
CONTENTS
CHAPTERS
I.
NINE CARDINALS IN THE AOKIGAHARA ............................................ 1
II.
AN ILLNESS OF PINES ..................................................................................10
III.
A HALO OF BEASTS .......................................................................................24
IV.
OLD LOGIC: AN ANCESTRAL BESTIARY ............................................37
V.
ODISEA DE LOS EXPULSADOS ................................................................58
VI.
ALMA, DEER STAR: A FAIRY TALE ........................................................67
ARTISTIC STATEMENT .........................................................................................................80
INFLUENTIAL WORKS..........................................................................................................87
v
Nine Cardinals in the Aokigahara
1
I am trying to explain. My grandmother lived with us since I was a baby.
She took care of me while my parents worked, and with her care, gave me
my first language—Spanish. It came to me through the records she
played, the dances I learned, the nicknames she called me, the food I ate,
the television I watched, the stories I heard. The identity first impressed
upon me was a Mexican one, my first language Spanish. This time was
good and warm and feminine—flowered skirts and golden lion brooches,
frying meat, sad songs, Pine Sol wafting on the air. But there was also
some deep wild sorrow that scarred us deeply, something from my
grandmother’s past. She’d escaped some old fairy tale, the only remnants
of it in photos of her in magnificent dresses in some arid wilderness,
alongside men who had been violent, hurt her. The sadness would rush
out of her sometimes, and when we’d have family over for fajitas and
Coors Lite, through a cloud of Benson and Hedges smoke, I’d see her
weeping, yelling.
From the dark bruise in the wet trees, birds would bloom into our back
yard—blue birds, sparrows, shining bright cardinals.
2
2
When my grandmother died of cervical cancer on February 16, 1993 at
MD Anderson Cancer Center, she was fifty and I was eleven. I had just
gotten my first period two months before her death. The illness that
festered in her sex had paralyzed and killed her just as I was becoming
fertile. This kind of coincidence gives way to magical thinking. Lately, I
believe that we are linked by the same poison from the womb, the same
heart, the same sadness in our sex. I am even named after her, Angelica,
and now I am tasked with beating her curse, not letting it kill me.
I am the daughter of a guitar prodigy and a workhorse. My father,
Gilberto Villarreal, is “La Maquina de Reynosa,” whose expert and
powerful rock en español sounds got him all the way to the US, to the
chain of Texas border towns called “El Valle,” the Rio Grande Valley.
where he met my mother, Silvia Gutierrez, lily of the valley. This is where
I will be born in McAllen, TX, five miles from the US/Mexico border,
and where I will drink from river water and take in the spirits of the dead.
3
3
1994. At the flea market in the Mexican part of town, I buy my first CDs:
Boyz II Men II and Nirvana’s In Utero. In Utero was the curious artifact
that I shouldn't have bought, buried under Los Bukis and Selena CDs. On
the cover, an angel descends, winged and serene as a marble sculpture of a
virgin, but her body is see-through, so that her internal organs are
exposed. The back cover art is a collage of the mess of the womb—
discarded fetuses, lilies, bones.
I am in the sixth grade when I cast myself in iron. I was all raw flesh
inside; puberty and depression began to bloom in my body like bursts of
black mold, starting in my deepest corners, spreading invisibly beneath the
surface. Maybe if I was best little girl in the world, I could fight the
darkness with godliness, urge with discipline. And so I’d come home to an
empty house—father out on tour with his band, mother arranging flowers
at the supermarket, uncle sipping whiskey from his thermos in his
eighteen-wheeler. So I tried to take my grandmother’s place: I cleaned, I
cooked bad invented meals for my mother so she could eat after work,
made straight As and acted reverential to everyone around me. But that
made everything worse, when my body cared so little for rules and craved
relief, sensation, power. So I tried being rude. It felt good. I wondered at
becoming a vegetarian—no. Was basketball interesting? No.
All the other Mexican girls I knew, with their ironed Dickies and thick
eyeliner, their accents—they were untouchable. Strong and brown and
beautiful, warriors of the world. They remind me of my cousins from the
Valley, like the people who knew and idolized my grandmother. They
looked like family. A swarm of other Mexicans would come to their aid if
they ever got into any broncas. I wanted that toughness, that family. So I
wore my father’s clothes, big khakis and plaid shirts, buttoned up to the
neck. I wore brown lipstick and teased my hair with hairspray. This was
the first stage. My mother said I had always been such a kind and tender
child, who was this person pretending to be stupid and mean.
Around this time, my cousin Ingrid had run away from home, and her
Kmart toybox came to stay at our house. It was a cheap, particleboard
box with brass latches and teddy bears adorning the outside. Inside were
notebooks and papers, a small glass jar bound with masking with the word
‘MISCARRIAGE’ handwritten on it in blue Bic pen. When everyone
went to sleep, I’d sneak into the garage and read the crumpled-up papers,
filled with strange drawings and crude poems about cigarettes, about
sneaking out, about the ways her body spoke to other bodies, the way sex
and music and feeling and drugs were a kind of healing, a kind of ecstatic
joy.
4
4
Our house was cheap and pink-bricked, crowded into a line of houses just
like it. They’d cleared out a patch of woods in the seventies to make a
small subdivision of cheap starter homes—dollhouses arranged into a
keyhole, linked together by a line of concrete. It was the American dream,
downsized, cheapened for low-income buyers, namely immigrants and
people of color. This is how we were set up. Behind our house, a forest
dense with thin Texas pines surrounded us. My family insisted we play on
the sidewalks and streets instead. But the woods were a private, wild thing
that held some dangerous secret. So, in my loneliness, I went into the
woods, and there among trees, stray tires, and weathered old furniture,
was evidence of a world I was shielded from. Later, I’d discover that I too
could take a pack of Marlboros and walk into the woods to read, to write,
to play guitar alone, or to be with someone entirely.
We once had a young tree in front of our house. It had a white trunk with
papery, fan-shaped leaves, square-veined, with a velvety soft fuzz
underneath. It was a tender thing; I think it was some kind of maple, but I
still can’t identify it. Anthills would gather along the roots of the tree, and
my uncle Javier who also lived with us, often drunk after cutting the yard,
would dump poison onto the ant mounds. It eventually stopped blooming
and rotted out. I bought another tree from the Arbor Day foundation
much later in college—I was maybe 20—but it died too. Something
wrong with our soil.
5
5
The Aokigahara, or the “sea of trees” is a dense, silent forest at the base of
Mount Fuji. When it erupted in the year 867, the trees that grew in that
volcanic soil were called ‘Jukai’ because they are green year-round, and
when seen from above, resemble an ocean. About one hundred people
per year go to the Aokigahara to commit suicide. It is thought that the
forest is haunted by spirits of the elderly left there during famines in older,
more desperate times. It is also haunted by tormented souls made demons
by their own suicides. At noon, the forest remains dark; the trees are so
dense, sunlight is blocked out. The trunks are gnarled and twisted, as if
cursed to be deformed. Demon spirits are thought to taunt the suffering,
to flicker among the trees and emerge from deep ice caves in the ground.
Frida Kahlo often painted her depression in visual metaphor,
conceptualizing grief in her self-portraits. The self-portrait that most
strikes me is “The Wounded Deer.” In it, she takes the form of a deer,
magnificently antlered, in a forest rich in dark greens and browns. She is
fleeing, her body braced mid-run, despite her calm expression. Her torso
is hit with nine arrows, blooming bright, red blood at each wound. The
animal part of her feels the pain, tries to flee its hunter—the human part
is calm, nearly smiling.
One of the fondest memories I have of my grandmother is the day we fed
the birds. The memory itself is incomplete, composed of disconnected
images I have crafted into a kind of fiction. In this memory, a record is
spinning its black, glossy orbit, but it is silent because I can’t remember
the song. We’re ripping bread into small pieces, maybe because it had
gone bad. It is summer; the house is dark and slow and cool inside, so the
lemon-bright day in the backyard seems to move faster than the time
inside. We line the bread along the dry fence and go back inside so that
from the window, we can watch streaks of cardinals swoop in, peck at the
bread, and fan out into the trees again.
6
7
1995. I hide the hits of acid behind the pan in my St. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts
Club Band CD case. I score it from Mandy, my first girl crush. Her skin is
lily white, which is why she has dyed her hair blue-black. I met her in
alternative school, the school they find a way to send the bad kids, the gay
kids, the kids of color to. I was there because I was caught with pot shake
in my pencil bag. I had never tried any drugs before, but because I lived in
that kind of neighborhood, I knew how to get them, and so I offered to
get some for the cool kids so they’d like me. Instead, I lose everything in
the process. I am banished to a school in the deep Klein pines, and there,
in the mouth of the monster, I have access to all the drugs I want. I am
most curious about acid. This is the first drug I do. I have no friends to
try it with, so I trip at home in my room and write bad, sad poems on my
typewriter.
Red means the first lipstick I ever steal: Revlon’s Cherries in the Snow.
Red means cardinals. Red is the color of my grandmother’s hair, which
she loses to the chemo. Red means getting my period at ten years old, and
the school nurse asking me if I have ever been abused. Red is the lip liner
I line my eyes with in the eighth grade. Red is the color of the spray paint
I use to write the word ‘faggot’ on my driveway so that everyone knew
who lived there.
Red is the color of the wounds in Frida’s side.
7
8
1996. At fourteen years old, I enter Gulf Pines Psychiatric Hospital in
Houston, Texas for severe depression. My behavioral problems had
begun three years prior, but reach their first apex in the winter of 1996,
when I confess to a kind of self-harm I still cannot write. My counselor
and principal say that I should be beyond the stages of grief, that I could
not have processed my grandmother’s death as an adult would have.
Once a ‘gifted and talented’ student, I flunk out of all my advanced classes
except for English. My mother begins to take me to a host of specialists,
from psychologists to psychiatrists to general practitioners, trying to find
the cause of my despondence.
Finally, she turns to the aunts, self-proclaimed healers fluent in the art of
the barrida, or a spiritual cleansing ritual. It is believed that the demons
living inside the body, be they illness, depression, or ojo—jealousy from
others—are drawn out by a the healer, armed with prayer, a bouquet of
basil, or sometimes an intact egg, rubbed all over the body so that the evil
has a place to reside. This ritual drives evil out of the body into the leaves,
into the egg, so that the sufferer can be freed from their torment. That
year, after a long barrida, they said I was lost inside myself. That I had
absorbed a dark and snarled demon, and that I’d struggle to free myself
from it for the rest of my life.
8
9
I dream of walking through endless dark forest, dense with fog. I dream
of empty songs on loop. I hear the song, but I can’t identify it, make out
the words or the melody. Sometimes I am some animal. I’ve hurt
someone. I feel intense guilt. I dream of cardinals swooping in and out of
my brains.
9
An Illness of Pines
10
Thirteen
Scan the leaves on the dress, the cardinal in flight. Do you see:
oiled lion, tubed to the nose. Pardon the line of ripped bread
along dried wood. The yield of red ranunculus and peony
ruffled. Parallel lines keep the wolf circling, our heads snarled.
It says so in the cards. A darkness in the blood. A crimson
muscle twisted in ink. A pool of rotting oranges. Twin girls
joined at the nape. A record spinning in a fog-draped living
room, violins gathered in bouquets. To resuscitate. There is a
shatter of rain before the world drains into the gulf. Tilt the
tin bowl toward the mouth. Round the dogs in the clearing,
bind their claws with hair. Respetame. I was thirteen when I first
felt a blonde boy. I still cough up his cornsilk, wind the spit in
my fingers. Fresh white breasts in the grass. Brown nipples
like mushrooms. July rubied with red stars. Once I found a
black boy floating in the river. Bicycles in the trees. Is there a
plan to dip the girl in ink, to lustre the hook from which she
will droop. The jaw hangs open. The yard is lousy with dead
dogs. To resuscitate. To resuscitate.
11
Angelica, the Guiding Cardinal
When I was diagnosed, the bread fell from my hands and the
telephone fell from my ear and the hair flew off of my head and
redded the wind, each strand a secret flowing onto the gusts and
away from your knowing. The hairs tangle in the sky and block
out the red sun. Only my story can save you, but it will die with
me and rot that peach fuzz sky black until you write: story.
Mis almas, listen to me: do not enter the sea of trees. I cannot
help you. You will long to leave this cursed home. You will long
for the dark. You will be dazed by the pioneer’s labyrinth and be
forever bewildered in the forest and you will not see the way out.
I am wearing a seafoam-green scarf so that no more hair falls out,
so that no more secrets fly out onto the air and darken your sky
but I am dying, mija, my teeth are loosening, my skin is sagging,
blackening, my eyes sinking, my hands and feet hardening. It is a
struggle to drag in air, and I will thin and the doctors will poison
my blood but there is a way I can protect you beyond death—that
little knot, that hard little egg growing roots inside me, it will hatch
and when I am dead and burned and the fire warms the little egg I
will fly into the forest where you, my daughters will be lost eating
flowers driven mad by your yearning, and I will try to fly you out,
beat my red wings against the dark.
12
El Mar de Arboles, or the Sea of Trees
At the cusp of your childhood, you will darken to illness.
You will wander from your vecindad and enter my blonde
wildness, dragged by leafy tide where the pines bloom hornets
and peonies burst from sweet eggs. You will stray from the
embrace and sing my glass song I leak through the radio and
tv. You may or may not see how the wind shifts through
fluted trunks, how the ones before you drowned in the leaves.
And you too will darken to illness and be hemmed into my
curtain of pines.
Your Mother and Father will float sirens into the black trees,
drive their questions into the wall of boys that circle their
house. Who has led her into that wooded heart? The boys will blink
their blue eyes and shrug. Just some other easy brown girl, lost like
the rest. Mother and Father will parse the branches, find only
limp Winstons, cassette tapes, ripped Budweiser cans wrapped
in roots. The trees will reverse their order, crowd the path
with dense brush, stack old tires into walls.
But you are gone, an echo trapped in pines. Know peace when
you do not find your way.
13
Ruin
I swim down to
look for my house. Here is your room. It’s my
own fault.
Am I very lonely?
I age in reverse until I am as small
as my child body. Longing is the hope
that the walls will finally
greet
each other
in collapse—
The lord is kind.
In a future memory we will run into rags
of snow. It will be almost spring. I grow
tall in the heavenless night,
a beacon.
Fox bells circle my
head or is it
low stars. I fell
out of my life and into myth, stacked
light throated in hard planes
like you, mist or flame.
I should be funnier here:
I am my own dread,
your body a kite
plummeting
through peaks.
14
Destierro: How Animals are Made
from The Official Bracero Agreement, August 4, 1942
For the Temporary Migration of Mexican Agricultural Workers to the United States as Revised on
April 26, 1943, by an Exchange of Notes Between the American Embassy at Mexico City and the
Mexican Ministry for Foreign Affairs
General Provisions
1) It is understood that Mexicans contracting to work in the United States shall not be engaged in
any military service.
2) Mexicans entering the United States as result of this understanding shall not suffer discriminatory
acts of any kind in accordance with the Executive Order No. 8802 issued at the White House June
25, 1941.
3) Mexicans entering the United States under this understanding shall enjoy the guarantees of
transportation, living expenses and repatriation established in Article 29 of the Mexican Federal
Labor Law as follows:Article 29.- All contracts entered into by Mexican workers for lending their
services outside
their country shall be made in writing, legalized by the municipal authorities of the locality where
entered into and vised by the Consul of the country where their services are being used.
Furthermore, such contract shall contain, as a requisite of validity of same, the following stipulations,
without which the contract is invalid.
I.
Transportation and subsistence expenses for the worker, and his family, if such is the
case, and all other expenses which originate from point of origin to border points
and compliance of immigration requirements, or for any other similar concept, shall
be paid exclusively by the employer or the contractual parties.
II.
The worker shall be paid in full the salary agreed upon, from which
no deduction shall be made in any amount for any of the concepts mentioned in the
above sub-paragraph.
III.
The employer or contractor shall issue a bond or constitute a deposit in cash in the
Bank of Workers, or in the absence of same, in the Bank of Mexico, to the entire
satisfaction of the respective labor authorities, for a sum equal to
repatriation costs of the worker and his family,
and those originated by transportation to point of origin.
15
IV.
Once the employer established proof of having covered such expenses or
the refusal of the worker
to return to his country, and that he does not owe the worker
any sum covering salary or indemnization
to which he might have a right, the labor
authorities shall authorize
bond issued.
the return of the deposit or the cancellation of the
It is specifically understood that the provisions of Section III of Article 29 above-mentioned shall not apply to the
Government of the United States notwithstanding the inclusion of this section in the agreement, in view of the
obligations assumed by the United States government under Transportation(a) and (c) of this agreement.
4) Mexicans entering the United States under this understanding shall not be employed
to displace other workers, or for the purpose of reducing rates of pay
previously established. In order to implement the application of the general
Principles mentioned above the following specific clauses are established:
(When the word “employer” is used hereinafter it shall be understood to mean the Farm
Security Administration of the Department of Agriculture of the United States of America;
the word “sub-employer” shall mean the owner or operator of the farm or farms in the
United States on which the Mexican will be employed;
the word “worker” hereinafter used shall refer to the Mexican Farm
laborer entering the United States under this understanding.)
Contracts
a) Contracts will be made between the employer and the worker under the supervision of the
Mexican Government. (Contracts must be written in Spanish.)
b) The employer shall enter into a contract with the sub- employer, with a view to proper
observance of the principles embodied in this understanding.
Admission
a. The Mexican health authorities will, at the place whence the worker comes,
see that he meets the necessary physical conditions.
16
Transportation
a. All transportation and living expenses from the place of origin to destination,
and return, as well as expenses incurred in the fulfillment of any requirements
of a migratory nature shall be met by the Employer.
b. Personal belongings of the workers up to a maximum of 35 kilos per person shall be
transported at the expense of the Employer.
c. In accord with the intent of Article 29 of Mexican Federal Labor Law, quoted under
General Provisions (3) above, it is expected that the employer will collect all or part of the
cost accuring under (a) and (b) of Transportation from the sub- employer.
Wages and Employment
a. (1)Wages to be paid the worker shall be the same as those paid for similar work to other
agricultural laborers under the same conditions within the same area, in the respective
regions of destination. Piece rates shall be so set as to enable the worker of average ability to
earn the prevailing wage. In any case wages for piece work or hourly work will not be less
than 30 cents per hour.
b. (2)On the basis of prior authorization from the Mexican Government
salaries lower than those established in the previous clause may be paid those
emigrants admitted into the United States as members of the family of the worker
under contract and who, when they are in the field, are able
also to become agricultural laborers but who, by their condition of age or sex,
cannot carry out the average amount of ordinary work.
c. The worker shall be exclusively employed as an agricultural laborer for which he has been
engaged; any change from such type of employment or any change of locality shall be made
with the express approval of the worker and with the authority of the Mexican Government.
d. There shall be considered illegal
any collection by reason of commission
or for any other concept
demanded of the worker.
e. Work of minors under 14 years shall be strictly prohibit, and they shall have the same
schooling opportunities as those enjoyed by children of other agricultural laborers.
f. Workers domiciled in the migratory labor camps or at any other place of employment
under this understanding shall be free to obtain articles for their
personal consumption, or that of their families, wherever it is most convenient for them.
17
g. The Mexican workers will be furnished without cost to them with hygienic lodgings
adequate to the physical conditions of the region of a type used by a common laborer of the region and the
medical and sanitary services enjoyed also without cost to them will be identical with those furnished to the
other agricultural workers in the regions where they may lend their services.
h. Workers admitted under this understanding shall enjoy as regards
occupational diseases and accidents the same guarantees enjoyed by other agricultural
workers under United States legislation.
i. Groups of workers admitted under this understanding
shall elect their own representatives to deal with the Employer,
but it is understood that all such representatives
shall be working members of the group.
The Mexican Consuls, assisted the Mexican Labor Inspectors, recognized as such by
the Employer will take all possible measures of protection
in the interest of the Mexican workers in all questions affecting them, within their
corresponding jurisdiction, and will have free access to the places of work of the Mexican workers,
The Employer will
observe that the sub- employer grants all
facilities to the Mexican Government for the
compliance of all the clauses in this contract.
j. For such time as they are unemployed under a period equal to 75% of the period
(exclusive of Sundays) for which the workers have been contracted they shall receive a
subsistence allowance at the rate of $3.00 per day.
Should the cost of living rise this will be a matter for reconsideration.
The master contracts for
workers submitted to the Mexican government shall contain definite provisions for
computation of subsistence and payments
under the understanding.
k. The term of the contract shall be made in accordance with the authorities of the
respective countries.
l. At the expiration of the contract under this understanding,
and if the same is not renewed, the authorities of the United States
shall consider illegal, from an immigration point of view, the continued stay of
the worker in the territory of the United States, exception made of cases of
physical impossibility.
18
Savings Fund
a. The respective agencies of the Government of the United States shall be responsible for the
safekeeping of the sums contributed by the Mexican workers toward the formation of their Rural
Savings Fund, until such sums are transferred to the Wells Fargo Bank and Union Trust Company of San
Francisco for the account of the Bank of Mexico, S.A., which will transfer such amounts to the Mexican Agricultural
Credit Bank. This last shall assume responsibility for the deposit, for the safekeeping and for the application, or in the
absence of these, for the return of such amounts.
b. The Mexican Government through the Banco de Crédito Agrícola will take care of the security of
the savings of the workers to be used for payment of the agricultural implements, which may be
made available to the Banco de Crédito Agrícola in accordance with exportation permits for
shipment to Mexico with the understanding that
the Farm Security Administration will recommend priority treatment for such implements.
Numbers
As it is impossible to determine at this time the number of workers who may be
needed in the United States for agricultural labor employment,
the employer shall advise the Mexican Government from time to time as to the number needed. The
Government of Mexico shall determine in each case the number of workers
who may leave the country without detriment to its national economy.
19
General Considerations
It is understood that, with reference to the departure from Mexico of Mexican workers, who are not
farm laborers, there shall govern in understandings reached by agencies to the respective
Governments the same fundamental principles which have been applied here to the departure of
farm labor.
It is understood that the employers will cooperate with such other agencies of the Government of
the United States in carrying this understanding into effect whose authority under the laws of the
United States are such as to contribute to the effectuation of the understandings.
Either Government shall have the right to renounce this understanding, given appropriate
notification to the other Government 90 days in advance.
This understanding may be formalized by an exchange of notes between the Ministry of Foreign
Affairs of the Republic of Mexico and the Embassy of the United States of America in Mexico.
From Mexico:
Ernesto Hidalgo, representative of the Foreign Affairs Ministry
Abraham J. Navas, Esq., representative of the Ministry of Labor
From United States:
Joseph F. McGurk, Counsel of the American Embassy in México
John Walker, Deputy Administrator of the Farm Security Administration, United States Department
of Agriculture
David Mecker, Deputy Director of War, Farming Operations, United States Department of
Agriculture
20
Coyote
Rags of clotted fur on bone Walmart tee-shirt, threaded with work on raw hand, wood brained in
silver, tooth cloth, a packed truck toward the destiny star, to enter the gold pear night, ghost in an
elk eye, land of cold evenings
Illegal
Pal norte guey pa gozar pa comprar botas y trocas y casas pa mi ruca pa mis hijos pa mi familia pa
mis huevos
Strain on our resources/economy
Milk north milk mall milk boot milk truck milk house milk maid milk child milk milked fuck milk
Promised Land
anchor baby beaner cheech cholo chuco clown car dirty sanchez fence hopper gordita greaser
jumping bean manuel labor mexcrement pachuco pool-digger river-nigger roach spic tire-hugger
vato wetback
Patriot; Tattered corpse disintegrates on XY axis brown flesh ripens purple a flush rot; tongue a
plain of flies; if you drown in the river blessed are the meek
Day of the Dead edition Starbucks Mexican Shade Grown Organic Fair Trade coffee with Mexican
hot chocolate and cinnamon jalapeño, free saint bracelet included, nice Virgen de Guadalupe tattoo
Free trade manifest destiny market meat market
21
Savage Tongue: Jokes
SPANISH WORD OF THE DAY: MUSHROOM
There’s not mushroom left in the truck, unless you have $10,000.
SPANISH WORD OF THE DAY: LIVER & CHEESE
Some coyote tried to rape my wife, and I said liver alone, cheese pregnant.
SPANISH WORD OF THE DAY: WAFER
I wanted to catch up to my mother but she couldn’t wafer me. She’s been missing for three months.
SPANISH WORD OF THE DAY: CASHEW
I was running after you but I couldn’t cashew.
SPANISH WORD OF THE DAY: WATER
My neighbor keeps calling the police on us and I don’t know water problem is.
SPANISH WORD OF THE DAY: BRIEF
My working conditions are so hot, I can’t brief.
SPANISH WORD OF THE DAY: CHICKEN
My youngest daughter, chicken work all day long.
SPANISH WORD OF THE DAY: JULY
You told me you’d pay me for a day’s work and July to me.
SPANISH WORD OF THE DAY: HARASSMENT
My boss fired mi comadre and after she left my boss said harassment nothing to me.
SPANISH WORD OF THE DAY: TISSUE
Let me tissue how to stay silent, how to smile through it, how to keep your head down.
SPANISH WORD OF THE DAY: JUICY
Mister, I’m looking for my husband. He was last seen in the apple fields. Tell me if juicy him.
22
Beast Meridian
vultures
on both sides
poised to eat
the doves
to split to never let them join hands and
let cross
lift themselves over the
the vault the
wounded wind
crosses
the corpse river flooded
the chosen nourished
with murdered beasts
23
A Halo of Beasts
24
The Crab
To not disturb the ocean. To dot the shore like sand crystals shine
back at the stars. I tumble in, out, dragged in monstrous circles.
Her tumor has spread up her spine, the doctor says, like a tree—black
branches seize the column of her spine, white roots spring from
her sex. Leave the room. I inch out sideways. The birds pack against
the hospital windows. I pull threads of red ribbon wrapped
around white lillies. February. Later, her body will be gauzed,
hollowed and burned. I imagine gold teeth glinting in the ash,
maybe one spared red hair.
Mother sits among stacks of paper. She is smoking at the table
when she begins to float above us, above the cut carrots boiling in
sea water, above half-full coffee cups. She ties us to her waist with
a cordon so that we can be saved from the rising. Still I face the
wall, anchored. When Father begins to float he is counting time
forward and backward on his hands. The trees bend, press their
branches into the glass, and this is how I am pulled by my hair
into the trees.
The sea water boils on the stove top, begins to fill the house. A
lone blue crab crawls out of the pot.
I call to someone, but I am suspended tighter still, my hair tangled
up in leafy branches, toenails twisted into roots.
25
The Lion
My fork pierces the egg a swollen sun a cut potato scorched and salted
along the oiled edges of abandoned plates. Cancered, she pulls one of
the red hairs that has fallen from her head and places it, like saffron,
into a pot of rice.
The drawers in her room open themselves. Sandalwood unfolds from
thick, perfumed scarves. A pair of chestnut castanets tied with currycolored yarn. Bleach and Pine Sol waft on the air. Opal-encrusted
silver hair pins she once used to pull her hair back into a tight dancer’s
bun.
Archaeology is like this—polished jewels in place of bird hearts,
threadboned ribs of some forgotten animal.
26
The Virgin
corded jaw smoked with stubble the pines between our
houses absolve and I run run run run and it feels good
good good good because the air is sweet and sweat and O
sweet boy I feel you pulling me across the sky to you
because tonight you are a saturnine centaur barreling his
chest into the forests of my heart and my head is your
head and in the pines to you I vow the cardinal in my
throat the woodsalt in my belly the chord in my starheart
27
The Balance
He will pull the car his parents bought him into your little
driveway, leading up to the little house your parents are late
paying. He will skip to the song that means goodbye by the
band you introduced him to and you both light cigarettes. He
wants to come in, but you say no. You’re not like the other
girls with nice houses.
You tell him you’d let him come in, but you have excuses
you’ve memorized: your parents are asleep, or you have
homework, or your parents have important company. Your
family is ashamed, they want no company.
You don’t tell him your carpet is as old as Charles in Charge,
and that the Tejano costume your dad hates but has to wear
for gigs is hanging in the living room before he leaves for the
night, the over-adorned botas perched on the amp, Univision
blaring Maria Mercedes into the living room. You don’t tell him
your computer still runs Windows 95, and that the last time
you got groceries was midterms. All you can offer him is
ramen, the good creamy chicken flavor, and some orange juice
you made from concentrate before school and you say, Why
don’t you come over for dinner next week? My family wants to meet you.
This, of course, is a lie.
That day, you visited his house, and his mother (call me Tina)
apologized for what a mess their backyard is—you see they’re
in the middle of building a second wing onto the house before
they sell it, it’s just that they use the third story for storage,
and hi, my name is Tina, call me Tina, Z talks a lot about you.
You admire the fruit trees in their yard and the wooden bench
and the long blonde deck and the canopy threaded with
bougainvillea and now you too are a tree shedding her red
leaves in the thicket, surrounded by warm pastures and pickup
trucks and all the words you can think to say to this woman
come to mind only in Spanish.
28
The Scorpion
I circle you in ownership, lift my tail to impale you to the
earth, but you are already further from me than the stars, a
bright cold diamond. I will pace the room and count the
things I do own. You’re packed, and through the hills the road
becomes a cordon of longing, and I
stand amazed at
the pale light on plains
the distance like horses
trampling the stones of the body
29
Centaur, Archer
I untwist your mane you yank your head back
steady
tranquilo
I crouch in the dust lean
heavy onto boot heels
tighten the strap
your
nakedness
I still admire
muscled lines
elegant haunches
tender eyes
it is cold
your breath
unravels like silk in water
I trace
my fingers
along the tunnel
your throat
I feed you
the rubbery carrots
the leather pouch full
of wheat germ rind of raw cheese
and hard bread
tape your bad knee
sand your round hooves
I pack
the barrels
with red shells
I sow the seams
my broken saddle
roll blankets to hang on its sides
I click my tongue
twice
tighten the leather reins
around
lead you
into the wild grass
steady
tranquilo
my fist
lavender evening
I drag the brush
down your inky flanks and as the dawn
washes down
the white stars
I brush
and brush
and brush
my gone horse
30
Horned Woman Ancestor
she places the pig hearts on the table opens salted flesh on
wood beast cooked for god
on naked feet we sing
the orchard song
noonday demon black the sun on this clement day of her
death
knot of black in her sex
pregnant with fists of
parsley and bloodhair
we mourn
on the mound
your smoky diadem currant womb
in the dirt
the floorboards of the forest open
the ground yawns
warblers
release themselves from the ropy cloves
the firmament opaque
the fisherman whaled
woodmother dead
mother walk the path along the palm of God’s hand
I too have grown horns and two faces to look always South
as I look North in this nightmare so American where I
count coins
I do not have
31
The Sea, The Sea
The moon swells its light into my chest and pulls the blackred
tide into the valves of my heart. Fish flick their silvery tails on
my heartdrum, sing me to forget you. The flood reds the
papers, floats the houses, unearths anchors which bludgeon
my head as the moon swells its light into my chest pulls the
blackred tide into my heart. I’ve looked too long into the rain
for your face, find only moonhorns on a vulture perched. The
tides pull fish into the valves of my heart. My hands are chafed
with the salt of you. The moon swells its light into my chest.
To find you, I tie a ribbon to the corners of the morning,
launch it like a kite.
32
The Tail of the Swallow, or Fish-Cord
My brown brother is a baby swaddled in a blue blanket in
my mother’s brown arms.
My father’s mother said, we are white and you are all brown, he
is not my grandson, you are not my blood. She turned her wide
back to us and cast us into the forest because we are
animals, this is where we come from.
When I was a child I was a swallow, a little red-breasted
brown bird darting over the tops of trees, but as I grew my
belly filled with white stones and weighted, one day I woke
up a woman, heavy, drowned in leaves.
My brother is a brown fish, already trapped in the sea of
trees and so I tell him, swim out. Do not swallow the
white stones. Lift your song to the morning, fish-cord, and
typhoon the world for your flight.
33
Ram, The Laborer
When I came to this country, I had never had iced tea. It’s not
so good, I prefer Diet Coke. I am obsessed with hamburgers. I
drive a troca, see it over there, in the white desert grasses, and
when I have the baby I’ll buy it an Escalade. It’s why I clean
offices at night and houses in the day. On weekends I find
chambas in the strip malls, bring shopping carts in for tips,
help unload the eighteen wheelers. At night, I cook for my
sister’s kids, platicando con las comadres. When I go out with
mis primas, I only use Revlon. This eyeshadow is called
wintercloud.
Mi novio loves me. He’s a musician and he says I am a song in
the distance and I miss him because he is also a song in the
distance, picking apples in the mountains. When our baby girl
is born I will name her a name you can only say in English so
that she will be Americana and because it is the language of all
beautiful and cruel things.
34
The Steer of Heaven
that shiny guitar you swing at lights makes those cornsilk cowgirls
crowd your stage and offer to make you feel like you are also
cornsilk because they see how blond you really are inside you wild
bullstar, and maybe you do it because your life feels like the
longest walk across some endless desert in a punishing indian sun
bearing its white weight on the flat-footed wilderness and your
thirst is so pale you let the cornsilk girls lead you through the gate
where you don’t see the yellow-eyed predators who would rather
break mountains than let you and so something shatters your
horns, breaks your hide, a wound in your head, and the stars pour
out of your brain and for one more breath you watch the girls run
into dull headlights and they glow so ecstatic as the stage of your
dreams
35
Time, Two-Headed: CORPUS CHRISTI, 1984
1.
mother and father
ignore the sea
turn their sanded bodies racking toward
ruin
some brunette
shadow passes
overhead
casts doubt one of us
had to falter,
one of us
had to hazard
the ocean
mothering its dead
just as
waves
gather from chaos
so does a spirit find
absence
a dull quiet
pulled ever
apart
from peace
2.
mother
draped on sofa
safe from craving
in sleep scalloped
spine carries us
horsemother we blinded
you
I brush ash
from the cushion
forever flattened by your weight
and lift
that strange angel
your scattered
body
father sleepwalks
through good
times reruns opaled bedroom light
night voluptuous
announces itself
on black
tracphone
he soaps his face
shaves the holes
careful not to awaken his opposite eye
pardon the metronome
in my chest
I’ve always kept faithful
the time the
song
you wrote
oath of
tricksters
36
Old Logic: An Ancestral Bestiary
37
Gilberto, Blinded Bat
Before, the gods were as varied and as vast as stars, as
appetite. I am an ordinary man, failing toward the dim, a
poor sailor lost: and so my music is like this, the strange
chord in the drive-thru at the Long John Silver.
Virgin, I am thinking about my wife. Her long neck and
sad, lined eyes. Marriage is a wound, a slow trim at wings
until a dullness boasts itself from the silent heart.
Marriage is a car speeding away from a room, ringing in
new silence. The screams bury themselves into the walls,
sharp as raw glass, or as silk sliding off the wrong woman.
The last chord of my days will sound like the way I talked
to my wife. You will know it—listen, it is regret.
38
Carmen, Ancient Bass
My body is oak eroded by
water. Time has been kind to me
in its sparing. Peaches fall into the river,
or is it snow, is it now my children
that emerge from that stony place I hid
their papery sleeves?
Fins are no use for cradling,
my limbs fan helpless
for gliding but if I catch
this star in my mouth
I will grow arms to embrace them
I drift
into the current
they will be heroes
39
Guadalupe, Star-Horned Bison
That these are the end days. That heaven groans blood. That I
have scienced the stones into a circle. That they speak of failure.
Let us pray.
I oil your feet, adorn them with lilies, tie them with sage. Say this:
I desire heaven. Water for the herd. The open plain. Cut the joint at
my hooves and spill the blood. Accept this contrition.
That the gifts imparted on us be plenty. That the stones shine into
coins. That the cedars kneel into houses. That our hooves become
feet. That our breath thicken to voice. That our herd become
children. Transfigure us.
I was once a woman at the lip of the ocean. I had a garden of
skullcap bordering a great white house. And then, the journey
north. Lord, we converted our hearts in the wrong direction,
fooled by national promises. We became animals in our lust, in
our appetite, in our anger.
Agony in the garden.
40
Juan Diego, Impotent Jaguar
A woman will come to me, the Casseopeia star. Her voice is an
ornament strung among branches. Her voice is a moonbeam
contained in her wild white throat.
She will not pity me. She will be robed in roses, she will be a
hunter, she will right my drunkenness. She will unmad the night
from grief. She will lead me down the false trail, up this mountain
to right the strangeness of the world. I will wait longer, there is
honor in waiting.
I am a flank of night, a pearled nightmare pacing the dark, a father
to my loneliness. This is why she will come.
I follow the roses toward windy peaks. My virgin will descend in
the cloud womb, and I am her dark Christ in a white monk’s robe,
a murder shrouded. Come up the false trail and see, I have woven
a fire for her. Come read my painted prayers. I will dazzle you
with her bright blood, red as spring roses.
41
Maria, Banished Fox
I am a woman of faith, made fox by my own cunning.
This is how our love began: long ago, in my flight from his pistol,
I fell in love with his clear-eyed stare. I watched him from the
trees, careful to hide my redness in the forest’s dark corridors. I
followed him home under the cover of woven leaves to his cabin,
where he lived with his pregnant wife, an opalesque woman with
chestnut hair who loved the water. She was far along, nearly a
mother, and I so envied her place in the world—happy, clearthroated laughter with her blue-eyed hunter, that in my envy I
gathered deadly berries and mixed them into her tea.
She did not take long to fall to my planning.
I am concerned about the low heaven and the leaves that do not
hide me from the sight of God. The wasps in my heart, the hive
they build in anticipation. A love spell, formulas I wrote on my
memory in opaled ink, performed when the moon reveals her full
white breast to the world.
I have laid the trap for my hunter. When he returns from the
hunt, he will sense my ghost in his home. I have entered his house
without his knowledge. I have put his house in order.
I have pulled the linens tight across his bed and scrubbed his
blonde floorboards. I have glossed his windows and ordered the
objects of his life. I have beaten and swirled the dust into the
heavens. I have arranged a bundle of foxgloves on the dining
table. I have thrown out the spoiled milk. I have gathered wild
roots and herbs and cooked a stew on the fireplace.
When he returns, he will see that I am already his new wife, and
that I am twice the woman his old wife was. He will put down his
gun. He will recognize me, despite my animal form. I will be that
auburn-haired woman, skinning foxes with a diamond ring.
42
Socorro, Barren Opossum
The twisted oak is my husband, the rushing river my wife.
My children sleep in the oak hollow where I brush their
awn with my tongue, warm them with my body. They say
my children are pine cones. They say my children are river
stones. They say my children are corpses, scandals of a
sick womb I have hoarded in my madness. But I have
named them; they are real.
Their father has a twin-headed organ. It is no matter. I am
pregnant again despite. My belly is the purse of heaven,
writing names in the book of souls.
43
Carlos, Tumored Coyote
The feathers crowd the mouth with unbearable softness,
coat the tongue in a baby-fine dry paste, but the meat is
necessary, even the gristle. Discard the beak and the
wattle, the tumored skin hanging from the chicken head. It
is filled with fleshrot, cell-splitting disease. This lump in
my throat, it mutes my howling. I am strayed from my
family, their calls never met by my reply. I am confused by
the land, the grasses reversed and the mountains shifting.
The cluster of knots in my kidneys, it taints my issue and
cripples my swiftness.
Orange moon rolls about in heaven’s lace, leads me to the
chickens. Never to my pack, never to my rest.
44
Joel, Duplicitous Bighorn
It is easy to disappear into the canyon and come out a
different man, a different animal. Man is a switching beast,
a fight made flesh, a sac of wind and anger. Even Jesus
was remade from man to God. Even Jesus fought the
Pharisees. Even Jesus overturned tables, talked back.
I am no better, no worse. Who do you say that I am?
My sons sow the land with my copies, my daughters are
spores caught in fertile breeze. I am the face that sees all
directions. I am two curling horns, tipped forward in
threat. Am I the ram of God, scaling the mountains to
heaven, or the horned beast, descending obsidian?
45
Ana, Starving Javelina
The meadow is white-clean.
Hunger is an arid warp in the gut. My teeth are dry wood,
my hide dull bark. I forage tired, sift the powdery sand for
rotted cactus fruit, trek the droughted basin pursuing one
shoot of grass.
The woods are an empty larder—my sons think apples of
stones.
The meadow grasses were once pearled strands of
sunlight, plenty in their bending—beetroot and wild carrot
dotted the berrybearded path—tender leaves pulled water
through their veined paper—cactus bulbs opened and
mimicked the bloomed sun—
A chandelier of grapes? No, a frozen branch.
I split my hooves with my tusks, and eat them to ward off
famine.
46
Mela, Warrior Wolf
We run
the land
the dark trails in glassed night we study
from the map in the moon
instinct whips
thinking into
patterns riddled;
which hunter will
the path
into our tangles
wild
wind
I am first a mother
second a catholic
third a
woman
threatened
we are the menaced
who menace
our children beaten
accused
of infiltrating and terrorizing
a nuisance
a drain
an impossible border
but mija
we are love
even love cannot cross
the magic ones
47
Dolores, Drowned Oracle
If you must speak to the wo/man in the water, bearer of
solutions, I am s/he.
This is divine aid: receive assistance, endure bitter and permanent
agony. It is how all have been helped by God.
Do not speak to me, unless I query. Touch me not, for I am holy.
You must be worthy of consultation. You must be worthy of
remedy. You must be disposed to hear bad news. You must fill
your heart with repentance.
It is then that the path reveals itself to my glowing cenote, a
chamber of water in the rib of the canyon.
I am the drowned sun but my light is deformed, confused by the
caverned water, suppressed by folded stone. Look for me, and I
am nowhere. Roll away the stone, and find me not.
48
Lopez, Praying Herd
Draw a line through our scattered bodies, and the meadow will reveal our constellation. We whip
our tails to a silent song:
We sing to the moon, ask for wings to lift our flock to heaven;
We plead to the moon since she is a woman, and will take pity;
We beg of the moon since she changes, as our circumstance must also change;
We repent to the moon since we fear for the dead, so that they will be liberated;
We praise the moon since she is a virgin, and blameless;
We worship the moon since she is our mother, and martyr;
We confess to the moon since she is forlorn, as we are forlorn;
We call to the moon since she passes, as we must also pass;
We pray to the moon since the forest is her echo, and we are made in her visage;
We sing to the moon, abandoned by God, as we are also abandoned,
[selah].
49
The Crocodile Who Waits at the Lake of Tears
In the loam
I am pulled hearttide
to lakeshore
blood to salt
longing to water——
leaves hang midair and
turn in strange magic
surround the lake
in a column
I walk through the curtain
of floating leaves and look
upon the lake the water still steel——
a watch of animals
gathered at the rim
have turned to stone
eyes hollowed
limbs atrophied
their weeping ossified
in terror
or grace
I hazard my body
seeking you oracle
I gamble my body being turned stone——
I still stand still in wait
of you still
still
and this is the trick:
the act of waiting
the nature of stone
50
The Oracle Surfaces, Speaks
(I am a restless body) (a comet entombed in water)
(I arise) (to the surface) (of the lake) (for sinners) (for those who suffer) (for the banished)
(for those who endure) (an agony) (without name) (without reason) (a curse) (of limits)
(come as rue) (come as rancor) (come defeated) (futile) (mute) (baffled) (yearning) (the impossible)
(ignore) (my rags) (my spectered body) (my isolation) (do not pity) (my consequence)
(I warn you) (with absence) (if you are) (to petrify) (in wait) (of me)
(I will never appear) (to the pious) (to flattery) (mystics) (sycophants) (I too) (am exiled) (I seek)
(a warrior)
(my child) (I cannot find) (my child) (the bottom is clean) (of his remains)
(alma) (the forest) (is invisible) (ignored) (forgotten) (its corridors) (shift) (confound) (& we choose)
(this bewilderment) (observe) (the insanity of trees) (the milkwhite river) (inky sky) (ragged cliffs)
(see) (the landscape) (constructed) (the wooded heart) (in emergency)
(drink of me) (to flush) (yourself) (of riverwater) (its tainted milk) (poisons the flesh) (urges)
(diversion) (ignorance) (neglect) (so you) (can be forgotten)
(this forest) (is a wound) (and you carry) (its story) (of a wounded woman) (a wounded womb)
(iterating) (like a branch leaved) (the leaves women) (a branch blighted) (the leaves blighted)
(this forest) (is a state) (as in) (a condition) (a bordered thing) (a land) (a concept) (an exile)
(alma) (do you see) (the war) (do you see) (the war) (within you) (why you are) (what you are) (why)
(you are here) (why your form) (is doe) (why you are antlered)
(deer) (often cross) (but do not survive) (the crossing) (they belong to the forest) (are of it in mind)
(despite their audacity) (to cross) (but they are plagued) (by doubt) (once crossed over) (too timid)
(your antlers) (are weapons) (sprung from your mind) (warrior heart) (you can evade the hunters)
(cross) (escape)
(but you want) (of yourself) (to be a savior) (to folk your story) (with rescue)
(possible outcome:) (your body) (the bridge) (your body) (pulled apart) (your body) (itself)
(the crossing) (our feet) (upon your back)
51
Guerolito, Gunned Down Elk
Let me set you straight, ruca: our asses don’t bang on nobody.
Hell yeah we creep on those pinches malcreados that beat their
gums at us or step to us on our lado. We fuck up los que lo
merecen, give em a calienton they’ll never forget. Orale guey, no
les damos chansa. But we run our little negocio and that’s it. This
is our turf, that ain’t. No cruzamos y ya.
Baby girl, we all got dreams. Pues vuela vuela por ese rumbo,
sueña y sueña, que el mundo es tuyo. Get out while you can,
mami. Serio, no te chinges, look at these scars. Esos cabrones
truenan. No mames. A toda madre. Sopla. Orale.
Look: estrellas peces. Fish stars. A bad sign.
52
Javier, Puma Perdido
O bruise of Christ, O flowering scar, bless
this station and let my truck barrel through
the night, so dense with lust
so that the stack of coins in my mouth will
open the world cloaked in shifts of hard
dark my scrapped body
aloft a road dotted with stars
no
just headlights
a lion’s mane warms the sky I entomb
this dense calm in you O Lord, drive into
the throat of the plainfields
rags of raw
grass
53
Silvia, el alma del bosque
my ghost begins in water——
casita in the dark between seas
my blood reverses and
flows back through my heart
and into this new body and
carves out a place en el bosque
exchanging my life to another where
your form began in me, in a brown house,
as haunting. I imagined
you as a deer in glass
and still we stepped inside the monster
turned its ribs inside out
I’ll tell you now, pull a thread through
this maze, make a hotel
of your elevated heart bursting
poppies
and ascend, venadita, bow your great antlers
to the moon and bride the rivers
to spill and spill until you spread
like a flood
54
Gilberto, Finned Balladeer
A fulvous sun leaves the warped trees. Trample the fish bones in the white dust. In the agate water,
the woman he loves. Dusk plummets on the autumn birds, pecking at branches. A mirrored lake
awaits the balladeer. A boat made of antlers. A fulvous sun leaves the warped trees. The blaze of
night threatens the east, leaking its illness. Neptune sings her wailing cry. From the remote cliffs, the
distance swells. In the agate water, the woman he loves. The worms begin to flower their sex into
the dirt and rise from the black to call the dust to its own dust. A fulvous sun leaves the warped
trees. The ceremony begins: he places his gun on the rock, and spins the water in the clay bowl,
singing the prayer to the woman in the agate water, to the woman he loves. The water rises, the
illness spreads, Neptune wails. The worms flower, the antlered boat spins. A fulvous sun leaves the
balladeer in the warped trees. In the agate water, the woman he loves.
55
Yesica, Struggling Snake
Papi, I had great fucking legs, and an ass you could taste just by watching me dance. I still feel my
legs sometimes, silky and brown and thick all the way up to my culo in dat pink g string. I look good
huh baby. Chula. Preciosura takes work, mami. Beauty is pain. Andale nena, vamonos pal club. U
want sum canela 2nite? Pa disfrutar.
But Puta, don’t fuk wit me or my kids. No sabes wat I go thru. Que te chinges, mami. He’s my
novio now. Only way u can have him back is if u fuck both of us.
A good-ass night would go like this:
Wat u doin?
Aqui, batallando. Strugglin. Aburrida. wat u doin.
Lo mismo. Lez get drunk
Orale, comadre, lez fuk it up!!!!
Then we’d pull up to the club in a truck, lookin chochas. Botas y Wranglers guey, and titty shirts that
show off our tatuajes. Vatos from all corners would come buy us shots. I’ll take it, but you can’t
touch. No te creas. I like a vato in kicker clothes. I’ll dance wit u. We’ll grind and sweat and he’ll put
his hand up my shirt and rub my titties and we’ll tongue kiss sexy until we can’t stand it. Bye
comadre, see u Mami. Then back to his trailer, donde follamos. I love it. I love to fuck. I love to
fuck and be fucked: to take it hard, to drop my culo and show u how I do it.
Pendejas call me a snake, and I do like to get down. But I can’t get around. And I like to get around,
compa. So I get down on my belly, and try to escape, get to the club where my cabronas are, y mi
novio. That’s my song, do you hear it?
Come lay wit me. I’m on a moonlit stone in a nest of dead leaves, sucking and sucking my frozen tail.
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Porfirio, Owl, Failed Mystic
The sky is veined with light from an imploded star, a dense magic threaded with blood.
O Lord, the animals of the forest walk in backward circles but this does not undo their life;
O Lord, to the North there are whips of light in the sky and a ship of welded stars examines
the immensity;
O Lord, to the Northwest a hanged man swings between two cliffs, his feet batter the
canyon, trees bend in pale wailing;
O Lord, to the West the sun has extinguished forever, and the devil sits on the lid of the
world and prevents the sunrise with his coded babbling;
O Lord, to the Southwest the bodies are whitening midstride in the dust, wedded to this
weakened hour;
O Lord, to the South the gate is flooding, the water approaches black and swollen, faces
emerge in the rushing;
O Lord, to the Southeast the mossbearded trees are dusted white and graves are churning;
O Lord, to the East the houses blow about like paper, horses tumble in the wind;
O Lord, to the Northeast the children seek the fairy sea but it is lightning, devilhair fraying
the sky.
I turn my head with open eyes, but cannot stop its turning.
57
Odisea de los Expulsados
58
Snow of Starlings
A low firmament vined with starlings, wings
bruised with crushed mica and a chaos of
throated vowels pierce out holes for stars and
wind threads of snow down, twist and spiral
down as if to unspool music, as blood travels
through water. Starling bodies flock and toss
without regard for planets, without regard for
audience, and just so, they flood the night’s
expanse and churn and whorl and freeze white
in flight, veering against god’s breath in the
diamond cold, and we see: the snowfall is
starlings, a blizzard of bodies that sail down
and collect in rags on shaggy pines.
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Glass Trail
In the blizzard, we trek. There is a map we
follow in the sky. Lightning traces its icy white
hairs and connects the stars into a woven plot,
into jagged electric roads in the sky, and we
translate them down, trace their momentary
sense, and fan out our sight. We consider mute
directions, brambled narratives in trees.
Sometimes a clear night. Sometimes miles lost.
Then the lightning roots down and needles the
earth, and the trail smokes, and a lens forms in
the ground, and we peer down, and in a
confusion of glass, we verify the journey. We
commit our sinew to length.
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The Sea of Drowned Calves
The dunes whip up into hives. The bladed
saltgrasses braid to the memory of water, ache
toward the tide. We drag ourselves through
beach pews, through the scene of axed water,
of spoiled sea. Moon howls raw over silvered
sand, the foamed water a tilted gloss. The
incense of brine, the rotated stars, the
powdered quartz. Tongues of water attempt
toward the pack. Ill waves crave new skulls to
grind. Each snowy wave blossoms polished
sacrums, fractioned horns, discs of shattered
vertebrae. In the water, floating calves. Fishes
dart in and out of mouths. A calf washes up
limp, broken from the ruffled surge. Then
another. Another. A music of corpses on the
coast. A stun in each pair of wide brown eyes.
A bawl from the herd, a surge of thunder.
The cycle of tides implies circles, as if
beginning ever met end, recognized it.
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The Sagging Pines
the poles begin to speak magnet spies
gossip charges the air North bends toward South
communicates down meridians we are forbidden this journey
the directions themselves reveal us the North a fickle ally
her star her diadem’s ornament
a jealous perch
her altitude
creation warps in a conspiracy of poles
switching thrones North becomes South
South becomes North
the land baffled
islands spin threads of lava
out into the sea
clouds growl and drag hurricanes erupt over glaciers
whiteout
pale palm-fronded shores
intrigued earth births mammoth geodes
glaciers turned dizzy pearls float to the surface
deep obsidian galleons
ores betrayed
fells ancient peaks
the pines pliant
as blown wheat
sagging toward New North
we take shelter
witness the land
what magic
has banished
in a garnet canyon
repel itself
us
so that
the poles would rather switch
than witness our release
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Northern Promises
Your mind is a terrible storm, and full of dark
insects. You are very intelligent, and can
succeed. Listen, sweet young thing, and put
your hand here. Feel the wilderness inside me
and find that wilderness in you. The world is
yours if you work for it, and your work ethic
will protect you. I am your guardian. Don’t be
afraid.
God has set the world you seek on fire for
you. You have already found heaven. He has
lit the lamp in your eye and guards you from
torment. Follow me, and find what you desire.
You are saved, you and all of your souls.
Her mind is a terrible storm, and full of dark
insects. She is dumb, and very dangerous.
Listen, beautiful creatures, and put your hands
on her body. Feel the wilderness inside her,
and use it. I will enact your rancor, make you
rich. I am your guardian. Don’t be afraid.
God will protect you from the intruders. He
has has set the world you seek on fire for you.
You have already found heaven. He has lit the
lamp in your eye and guards you from
torment. She leads you to certain death and
destruction in her madness. Assist her, and
you will all catch fire, your cries soundless in
the roar.
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The Stranded Lamb
1 It was told that at the top of the
mountain, one could find the
stranded lamb surrounded by a
dome of floating moths. 2 After
the purification, the brushfires, the
chaos of locusts, the wars on the
pyrite cliffs, & the opening of field,
the lamb climbed the mystic ladder
up the mountain & would not
descend. 3 The cursed seek the
lamb to feed it & bring it water in
oblation. When they find it, it is
unwell. 4 Pustules dot its eyes &
sludge its lashes; its body withers in
starvation & thirst; its fleece clots
with flies. Maggots soft & white as
rice bloom from its belly; its brown
fleece blows away in the frigid air.
5 It bends its head & offers its
body. It is already dead. 6 To seek
the lamb is to starve; do not eat
from its flesh, but suffer as it has
suffered. 7 To suffer is to
comprehend history. 8 To gaze
upon suffering is to shatter the
heart & devastate the mind. 9 To
see betrayal. 10 Who crushes them
with this tempest, & bitters the
night? 11 The earth belongs to the
wicked: the ocean blackens, the
earth balds, sky churns to blood. 12
& the animals mourn. The lamb
cannot follow, & so they leave it,
unsaved in the wilderness.
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The Unspooled Tide
In the realm of the moon, the light makes
forms out of our madness.
To find the original light is to find the
source body. Our curse is albedo.
In fire, we discover our human parts:
hooves split into toes then fuse again, hair
unravels from buffalo heads, bristled fur
recedes to reveal skin in the firelight,
regrow in the dark. We scarcely remember
our flesh forms, or recognize our
ownership.
We awaken to the fullest moon we have
ever seen. Her creamy bloat drifts so close
we can almost touch her. But we diagnose
her spell and avert our skulls, face her
opposite, and head again toward the dark.
In our traveling sequence, we angle toward
the firs. We run toward utter dark. Some of
us slow, magnetized by her light, admiring
her silver melancholy. We rattle the dazed,
hide their eyes in our ranks, and push
forward.
But as we reach the top, a taut unmoving
arc of seawater perches on the lip of the
canyon. The moon detaches from her stare
and floats back to her orbit in reverse. The
water wall shivers at her absence and
topples over, crashing down on us in long,
foamy loops, as if it were hair tumbling
around the canyon’s great white shoulders.
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The Return, a beginning
We labor into the sloping rock of the bald
dark valley. The cold empties our hearts.
We find shelter in the canyon. We gather,
fold our hooves beneath our bodies. We
wait for sleep.
The rules are this: Our numbers are fragile,
leave no one. We walk to find peace;
walking is peace. We will always be lost.
Keep faith.
The shapes on the canyon are riddles,
moonforms deformed by a trick of light.
And from here, it is clear: All land answers
to two bodies, but we are bound to the
moon, cursed to the cast of borrowed
light. How to find the original body?
We remember fire. We begin with dry
twigs, and from them flare up original
light. From the fire emerges telling, a
making of systems so others can see.
66
Alma, Deer Star: A Fairy Tale
67
I
t begins with a fondness for running away. The girl disowns her homeland. She desires
strange, high dwellings. The uncursed live north of the river, so why can’t she. She abandons
her family with ease and follows a uncursed boy into the pines. He holds her hand. He
commands the leaves to shiver like coins and suspend in the air. They hide within a curtain
of gold leaves. Because he has shown her himself, she will give him her human body. He
brings down amethyst planets and feeds them to her, one by one. She drinks from a stream. I
am not lost, she thinks, as years pass.
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T
he boy she loves is a corn-fed son of sons all sinew and muscle and good blond genes
and one day he would leave West, speeding toward a golden sun on Ben White
Boulevard because darling had a future clear and white so plowed and so fertile so
certain for a certain type of boy from a certain type of family, fashioned from wheat
and sun and warm yellow days in warm yellow kitchens with a warm smiling mother
humming in a room thick with flour and him in his bedroom eggshell blue with cows
outside singing him Texas lullabies as he sleeps and wakes up a man, ready to find a worthy wife.
69
B
birth.
ut instead he finds the girl, fashioned from dark clay and black cobwebs and black
mold and illness sugared over and girled to sound, a sad ballad spilled through to the
womb, a bad gene passed from generation to generation of women who cropped their
hair and furious, streaked the town with their wailing, Llorona, and if not taken by grief,
and not taken by madness, and not taken by envy, and not taken by regret, will sit in
the woods like the women before her and devise her own end, savage and strange as
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A
nd he almost chose the savage girl from the dark, and this angered his family so white
that his mother lined up all the blonde marriageable girls all around the neighborhood
and introduced him to each as they clustered in the cul-de-sacs, tumbled from their
windows, jumped off of trampolines, swam out of jeweled water pools, clamored out
of lockers. The lines were so long to the marriageable blond prince that the girls
worried about getting lost in the lines, so they braided their blonde hair together, and
this cornsilk line stretched and stretched and stretched to the end of his Texan kingdom, and they
came, one by one, to his door. No one in the kingdom ever thought he’d let one in.
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A
ccording to legend, his mother concocted an elixir and rubbed it on the prince’s
temples in his sleep so he would forget the savage girl. After all, his bloodline is pure
and should not be mingled with animal blood, it is unholy and will bring illness to the
good people. And so tortured by distance, the girl grows wild with sadness. Her hands
buckle and fist and her nails bind her fingers hard together into tough hooves and in
this new form she tosses her head in desolate grief. She walks through tangles alone
into the pines, where she once shared a bed of leaves with the prince, and there she is whipped by
bare branches, where her skin welts and opens and her blood mixes with moonlit water, where she
eats raw fish crouched by the bank, where she lets her sadness flow into the river.
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T
he girl takes a knife to her scalp and braids the remains of her hair to the willow
branches as offering. She sings to the fox and washes his fur with soapstone. She
travels to the top of a mountain and begs to be made the moon and lure the sun with
her song into the darkness. She runs through the forest calling the prince’s name,
running faster and faster, and so her body grows strong and muscled, her eyes made
alert and animal and she grows magnificent antlers jeweled with moonlight.
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A
nd so in this form, she walks undetected back into the kingdom to the prince’s castle
in a new and wild beauty. There, the prince sits at a long wooden table with a blonde
girl at his side. She laughs with the Queen, and the sisters are also lined up, tallest to
smallest, along the wall, holding plates heaping with food. The king sits across from
the Queen, his hands covered in rings, in his best Wranglers and plaid shirt, and the
girl knows then that she has arrived at a wedding.
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C
ardinals swoop down from the trees and swarm the window, blocking the girl’s view.
She stamps her hooves and bucks her antlers wild at their flight. From the depths, a
hunter sends arrows flying toward the girl-deer. Arrows plunge into her side. The
wedding party coos at the deer just outside the window, deem it a good luck charm.
The prince considers hunting the wild game which offers itself so freely at the window.
The cardinals redden deeper in alarm as they see that the girl-deer is giving up, ready to
be hunted. The cardinals pull on her antlers and lead her back into the trees. The sun descends
forever into the pines.
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S
he is still trapped in the night, among the black pines, a monstrous antlered creature wed
to her grief. She canters through the woods, crazed with a loneliness that manifests as
flowers that burst forth from her antlers. She runs East toward the logical dawn, but the
clouds gather there like black ink in the sky. This is the Queen’s magic, the curse that
defines the darkness. In causing the prince to forget the girl, she has also caused a
condition of pervasive darkness to surround her. He can no longer see the girl, can no
longer remember her, and so it is for every person of royal lineage in the kingdom.
Little does the Queen know that a soul cursed to invisibility and darkness—this is how stars are
made.
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I
n her exile, the girl has found a foamy river that crashes down the mountainside. She makes
herself drunk when she takes from it. The treetops scrape the ceiling of stars. She watches
the stars turn overhead, begins to recognize the forms of beasts in the sky. The lion, the
sheep, the centaur. The tragic beasts, trapped in their spinning. She fashions a crown of
constellations, links their stories into a halo. Her open, wild eyes grow clear with language.
Her heart is a vibrating hum in her chest, a red dark wound beneath her glossed fur. To get
out of the forest, she realizes, she must be the first to tell that story.
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L
ook up in the sky. There, floating along a river of planets, you will not find the deer—
not yet. You can see the warrior, the crab, the water bearer, all the narratives of the West.
In the Mayan constellation, the deer is called Manik, and she sits between death and the
yellow birth star. Her story is told. Her destiny is marriage and pain and wandering. But
in the Western way, the deer star is open, not yet formed. Watch for her to burst forth,
to command the red west, to scream to life, victorious in her story.
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A
nd so it begins: the Queen is laid in her chamber, in her window her sterile blonde
kingdom. The prince is married, the blonde at his side mild as milk. The Queen opens
the lid to the washing machine. A swan emerges from the suds. Blood feathers the
water. It is a sign.
The Queen walks toward the opaled light in her window.
A bridge is being drawn below.
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ARTISTIC STATEMENT
Forest Songs
“I tried to drown my sorrows but the bastards learned how to swim.”
― Frida Kahlo
1. For as long as I can remember, my aesthetic has focused primarily on the sonic. This might have
something to do with my dad being a musician. This is not to say that I write sonically-focused
poems or prose, but that sound, specifically pleasing strings of sound, need to be present in my
writing in order for me to be happy with it. Soft consonants pair well with open vowels: blood, dove,
drove, whorl. To me, sound accesses the deepest gut, knocks the bowels around, is furthest from the
brain.
2. One of my favorite scenes in Six Feet Under is when Claire draws a series of tombstones on her
paper during a class sketch exercise. The class is trying to find its ‘own language’ with which to make
their art. Some students copy Kandinsky, or produce a visually pleasing, photorealistic self-portrait.
But Claire’s dark charcoal lines and smeary tombstones are not careful, and because of that, much
more powerful. The teacher picks up her sketch, asks the class why it’s good. Claire says, “I don't
know, it seems kind of obvious.” The teacher responds that she is embarrassed by it because it’s true,
and it’s good because it makes him want to throw up. That gut feeling—the stir in the bowels, the
jiggling of liver, that bodily wound—is the furthest from the brain, he says, which is the enemy of
art, of true feeling.
He sounds like Lorca.
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3. In “Deep Song,” Lorca writes, “Like the primitive Indian musical systems, deep song is a stammer,
a wavering emission of the voice, a marvelous buccal undulation that smashes the resonant cells of
our tempered scale, eludes the cold, rigid staves of modern music, and makes the tightly closed
flowers of the semitones blossom into a thousand petals” (3). He dismisses the song one learns, its
vulgar grammar, its measured processes. Rather, he prefers the deepest song, the first human
utterance, the cries of animals, the voice of our deepest, most human animal nature.
4. This summer, I sat down again to write my thesis. I was feeling lost, not knowing how on earth I
was supposed to write a novel. I turned off the lights. I darkened the room. I played music that
unsettled me. I played Melancholia on loop. Then, something happened.
My bowels shivered, and up swelled a shining verse, then another, then another. I wrote about
myself, and my family, as animals. The landscape was a forest, cursed so that we could not leave. A
white witch had trapped us there, the mother of a human boy my ‘main character’ loved.
5. The power of the subliminal is a white root that winds its way both onto the page and into the
blood. I write, my blood is siphoned into language.
6. When I was 19 or 20, my first love broke up with me. His mother didn’t care for me at all. I was
“not right” for her son—not white enough, not smart enough, not headed to the right schools, not
much to look at. I entered an intense depression after that breakup, left school, began working at
various retail stores, consigned to a fate of mediocrity, fulfilling her prophecy. I want to break her
curse. I hope my book can break all brown girls’ curses. I want it to sound like a spell.
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7. I am concerned that many stories of trauma and loss use forest imagery to contain their narratives,
and lend symbolic weight to their journeys. My forest is a metaphor for depression, for insecurity,
for ignorance, for poverty, for Otherness. The animals are trapped there because they are cursed,
their humanity stolen from them. The forest is the immigrant condition. I hope this is enough for
sharp-toothed critics.
8. In Milk and Filth, Carmen Gimenez Smith writes her body into grotesque language, grotesque
space. Her body is commodified, nationalized, colored brown, magicked, violated, made sexual,
made decay. Her body is my body—its creative magic, its agony, its flame. It would seem she
understands my ancestral predicament when she writes, “A woman can’t / hold all that storm in her
head, / so she surrenders to it” (29).
9. It is a strange and wild thing to imagine a story out of thin air, to plot it out, to connect character
to dynamic swells of action and consequence so that, by the end, the story is as taut as a drum,
resonant and fine-tuned. This is was my original intention—to write a novel. To move beyond
telling my own story, to move beyond my history and make a cartography of a new artistic space.
But as I plotted this novel, planned it, constructed characters and trusted in the process, the
sentences felt hollow, crumbled into disjointed anthills on the page. My head wasn’t interested in
neat arcs, resolutions, clear through-lines.
10. Lorca, John Keats, and Allen Ginsberg all speak of the same thing when they talk about their
process. From Lorca’s canto jondo, to Keats’ negative capability, to Ginsberg’s first word best word—
the idea that some pure, unadulterated language sits just beneath the mantle of the logical mind, and
that our charge is to access that raw space which is the font of our deepest humanity—this is the
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kind of process that drove this project. The process of accessing the no-mind, the space of
meditative flow, the space of subconscious association, the language that lives in the depths of the
body, has allowed me to exhume old ghosts that keep surfacing in my work.
11. In this work, the narrative emerges from the way the sections speak to one another, and how
each piece relates to other pieces within the same project. The pieces refuse to connect fully to each
other, to construct characters, to resolve, to see the animals leave the forest, because like an essay,
the work is pieced together impressionistically from memory and experience, and like poems, each
utterance operates on its own terms, on its own page, in its own language, speaking to the larger
project rather than toward resolution. While I was concerned with movement, with resolution, I
often spoke to Marcia about my difficulty ending the project, which evolved over and over again,
from a novel in prose blocks, to poems, to essay, to fairy tales, to odyssey. It turns out that writing a
resolution was impossible for me—I still hear hurtful rhetoric, see my family robbed of their
humanity every day—to end this project in resolution would be disingenuous.
12. During my undergraduate years at the University of Houston, I learned that I should write taut,
clear narratives destined for the New Yorker slush pile, or at the very least Ploughshares. This meant
taking a page out of Raymond Carver, Billy Collins, or Lorrie Moore, to write middle-class realist
narratives, for white middle-class readers. And this is all indeed fine writing, if a little limiting. What
I did learn very well during that time was style—strong and complex characters, economical
language, distilled powerful verbs. Although, despite this conditioning, something still rang false in
my stories and poems. Something about transferring my lived experience into the tight veil of realist
writing warped it, created a sterile bourgeois simulacra. I was writing for middle class readers with
middle-class expectations, and so had to flatten my prose. Even though my characters were Latin@
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with names like Pilar and Marielena who lived in border towns or rough barrios, their stories were
still sanitized for consumption, and therefore robbed of that thing that makes literature feel alive and
new.
13. I was told to look to Junot Diaz and Sandra Cisneros as role models producing the finest Latin@
literature today. And they are—they are writers writing at and for the high middle in such a way that
everyone can understand. But emulating them didn’t work for me, and it seemed, it didn't work for
other Latin@ writers submitting their work to Gulf Coast, the literary journal I interned for. Our
stories often portrayed Mami, tired from long work days but still sassy; Papi, gentle or absent but
with firm discipline as his legacy; and a lot about abuelitas who were a little bit magic and cooked
wonderful food. This, of course, is all true, but it is also cliché. It wasn’t the form, or the language,
right for the way I saw things.
14. When I was accepted to Boulder, I was so excited to come to a program which promised a
community of innovative writers, invested in new ways of telling, with new forms and new
approaches to language. This was enormously promising to me, especially with the problem of
Latin@ writing in question. How to still write a compelling story about childhood and illness and
magic and family without it sounding like the same old documentary immigrant narratives? It would
seem that innovative writing held that answer.
As it turns out, conceptual writing can often be hostile to identity politics. Subjectivity is often seen
as the enemy of innovation, and that the way to battle the familiar in language is to be suspicious of
its expressive qualities. Language is constantly failing us, failing to represent experience. Therefore,
we must deny the subject, deny meaning, deny narrative and interrogate language itself, its biases, its
84
structural prisons which limit and mute us. And I get it, this linguistic stance—language is an
inadequate medium which constantly fails to contain or represent experience, so our job as
innovators is to move the art forward by reimagining language as more than a means to transmit
narrative, which means letting go of subjectivity. And what a delight it is to just play with language
without thinking about story or struggle, to wreck syntax, to warp meaning-making.
But, in my mind, Latin@ experience hasn’t had the benefit of time in literature quite as long as white,
middle-class writing has. Even if literature has moved on from expression, to a writer who has never
had any choice but to live in a conspicuous identity, to track the conversation through time, to live
as other, subjectivity is a primary concern.
15. In Borderlands, Gloria Anzaldúa speaks to my deepest heart. She writes that the mestizo identity is a
hybrid of many heads, with a necessarily conflicted hybrid aesthetic: European grates against Indian,
Catholic against pagan, masculine against feminine, third world against first world. We are constantly
in agony, fighting aspects of ourselves that are in conflict. As a Mexican American, I have always
struggled with identity negotiation—to be a poor person of color in America is a form of deep
psychic self-devaluation, where we are rewarded when we assimilate but kept at bay in every other
sense. This kind of identity negotiation and subjugation is a violence that wounds the concepts
surrounding sex, gender, sexuality, class, etc. In a country that dehumanizes Mexican-Americans,
casts them into roles of workers with no right to this land, all that is left for us to do is submit in
silence, according to Anzaldúa. We inhabit a shadowland as shadowpeople, a liminal space as liminal
creatures, invisible, unseen. I had been writing this before ever reading her book.
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15. I am most interested in the question, what does it mean to innovate as a writer of color? It has been the
central question I’ve asked for three years, suspended between the more conservative aesthetics of
Houston and the more experimental language of the Front Range; suspended between my Mexican
heritage and all its programming and my daily existence in white America; suspended between
fiction and poetry and essay. The plasticity of hybrid forms is attractive. But the problem remains—
representing a troubled identity while finding new and inventive forms, voices, narrative methods,
and projects is a middle space that easily turns into a chasm. How to move beyond realism, beyond
magic realism for that matter, and fashion teeth out of language so that it bites while it smiles?
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INFLUENTIAL WORKS
Antichrist. Dir. Lars Von Trier. Perf. Willem Dafoe, Charlotte Gainsbourg. Zentropa Entertainment,
2009. Film.
Andrade, Jorge Carrera and Joshua Beckman. Micrograms. Seattle/St. Paul: Wave Books, 2011.
Print.
Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands = La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1999.
Print.
Baranda, María, and Joshua Edwards. Ficticia. Exeter: Shearsman Books, 2010. Print.
Baus, Eric. “Granular Vocabularies: Poetics and Recorded Sound.” Naropa University Summer
Writing Program. Naropa University, Boulder, CO. Lecture.
Baus, Eric. Scared Text. Fort Collins: The Center for Literary Publishing at Colorado State University,
2011. Print.
Borges, Jorge Luis. The Book of Imaginary Beings. New York: Penguin, 2006. Print.
Burke, Edmund, and David Womersley. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime
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