Aborted Landing

My shirt the one with the Nehru collar
has followed you into the valley.

Shadows have gathered their pebbles
and now stand upright.

Your smile red as coals
under your red hat.

Raza doesn’t enter into it.
Wave it away.

Climbing The Sun

In the shadow of the pyramid
you dropped your compact,

rosy cheeks sunlit,
crest of stone in the distance,

bubbles from sparse grass
greet the carapace of wind.

We’ve spent half the morning climbing
with the pungent horizon battling back.

Flanked by your eyes,
the guilt of a race

dark brown.
Opening the door of the tour bus,

the old man’s heart
having put down obsidian knives long ago.

Eduardo C. Corral won the weekly
The Sixth Daily Poetry Project

Caballeros

I’m talking to Robert Frost,
I’m estimating the cost.

He's wanting a mending wall
at the strip mall.

Winter is long gone,
leaving us rhyming in the sun.

Robert’s got a little horse
which looks a lot like Harold Norse.

He’s taking him to the very farmhouse
whose owner always acts a louse.

We don’t talk much about art,
lest we give his little horse a start.

Ando Volando Bajo

Would we have been like Ted and Sylvia,
or like Cal and Elizabeth?

Cesar on the streets of Paris,
his poems shaking apart the streetlamps

while Georgette placed morsels
in the boiling water.

Van Gogh wandering the country lanes,
not knowing what new love

would get his other ear.
I’m your Pedro Infante

going down on a plane
instead of on you.

Working On A Chain Gang

In the barrio I ate rocks
with a light dusting of dirt.

Aztlán grew like a beautiful woman’s body
in far-off fields.

In school all the dark ones
were thrown together.

We chattered in Spanish
behind suffocating walls.

We did not have
our own souls.

Our eyes were empty
confused and cramped.

The brown church
favored the meek.

Eventually I busted out,
made strong

by the very rocks and dirt
I once despised.

Skunk Minute

I am the father skunk,
I stink.

I cross the road
into the weeds.

I head down to the river.
I get my whiskers wet.

I hasten back to the mother
and the boy.

I see the black and white
hidden in the den.

They look up with their eyes
to recognize.

I lie down in their midst
like you can never know.

Juarez Girl # 219

Her eyes smashed to a rosy color,
her panties torn by an asteroid,

a comet slamming into her belly,
a misplaced tornado twisting her brown hair.

The dusty, littered street
knew she was on her way to her cousins.

She herself did not know
she was going to spend the night in hell,

before she made it to heaven.
Juarez streets will fool you  just  like  that.

Tea Partiers=Klu Klux Klan

Judson Phillips, tried to distance himself from crazed
and racist elements – but later endorsed racist speaker
Tom Tancredo even after he told the convention: "People
who could not even spell the word 'vote', or say it in
English, put a committed socialist ideologue in the
White House. His name is Barack Hussein Obama." Tancredo
blamed Obama's election on the fact that "we do not
have a civics, literacy test before people can vote in
this country." He got some of the loudest cheers of
the weekend.

from Salon.com

A Poem By Andres Montoya


after looking for che in the lines and rhymes of a poem,
the young man decides to write the crazy gypsy

for luis omar Salinas

omar, last night when the moon threatened to expose me
I jumped into a river, into a boat, untying my steed
with the speed of a thief, thanking God my getaway had begun.
I can’t tell you the names of the trees that passed or the colors,
but I tell you the frogs howled like hounds and dared me
from my spot. I said to myself, “I’ll find omar
where the poor gather to speak baseball and politics.
he’ll be there, I know, talking the philosophy of a whisper,
interpreting the dream of a widow, quick with a tear
for a boy smelling of ditch water.”
omar, I’ve been doing the tango all day
looking for you among sleepless mothers and drinking men, searching
with the smile of a madman. I want to ask you about the whistle
of a line, a gava’s evil glare, about the family
of a woman who died in one of my poems.
omar, I need to confess, when pachuco children growl
in their stomachs, I wish my poetry was a rifle to take aim.
I don’t have time to be a gypsy or an aztec, I’m chicano, an Indian
who sees life swallowed up in a dream and wants to explode.
I know you’ll see the anger of a peacock in my eyes
and understand. I know you’ll say, Joaquin, do what you have to do.
omar, I need to swim in your river of words,
your giddy interpretations of despair, your hope for the sadness
of our days, I want to give my gratitude on a plate
with beans and rice, with a laugh, a beer, thankful to talk to you at last,
discussing streets of the angry barrio.

A Poem By Eduardo C. Corral
at Poetry Daily.

Three Poems By Eduardo C. Corral here.

Hey,it's SXSW and Spring Break.
Be back Monday.

Meanwhile,check out Andrew Shields'
The Sixth Daily Poetry Project

Read some Ronnie Burk poems here.
And Lorna's tribute here.

from F-Minus

Jessica Cruz

Jessica up on the cross,
hammered for my sins.

Romans with smoldering eyes
hands of marvelous leather.

Swords squint into the sun
with higher orders I presume.

Jessica suffered on the cedar,
her spirit fidgeted,

the night crested and fell
yet dragged itself aloft.

Daylight brought forth
the watery sun.

The damage done,
I blend into the crowd.

By The Sea, By The Sea, By The Beautiful Sea

Neruda’s Mermaid

When the rains came
I was unprepared for your loins:

My eyelids in your clothes,
my tongue of newspaper headlines.

( I tweet the size of your cups,
giving a heads up to the burglars.

If they so wish,
chimeras are also welcome.)

The night features a moon---
I’m your barrel-chested star.

Curious sound of storm clouds
in a knot up high.

Our kisses harden
to their cone.

Spent, I drag your seaweed laughter
from the shore.

The Heartbreak

The girl I loved
took the pots and pans---

I still love her,of course,
and now I boil water in my hands.

The Juarez Zombie

The girl they raped and shot
in Juarez,Mexico

comes back to haunt me
with her broken glasses,

her torn, cheap panties,
five teeth shattered,

by the gunshot,
hair fused together by blood,

her DNA like dead stars
fills the endless space of my nightmare---

dawn buries her,
but only until nightfall brings her back.

I Know An Hombre

As I sd to my
amigo, because I am
always hablando,---Juan,I

sd,which was not his
nombre,la oscuridad sur
rounds us,what

can we do about
it,or shall we,y
porque no,buy a goddamn Toyota

drive he sd,santa maria
madre de dios,you drive
like a viejita.

The Last Days Of The Brown Buffalo

After the thousandth or ten thousandth Canto al Pueblo, sometime in the 1970’s,
after listening to a lesbian chicana read her manifesto (manifestos were popular
at the time, hell, I probably wrote a few myself) anyway, after Oscar Acosta (later
to be known as the Brown Buffalo) read a chapter of his still unpublished novel,
and after I read my poems in front of an audience of fourhundred people, Oscar
and me went out to the back of the public school (that’s where this particular poetry
reading was being held, on the east side of Austin, raulsalinas’s old stomping
grounds, his pony tail waving in the barrio air), anyway Oscar and me went out
behind the school to relieve ourselves. Just as we were about to zip up we
noticed a blue and white Volkswagen van crawling by like a snail, lo and behold
it was Juan Rodriguez and his family cruising on by on their way to South Austin.
Oscar and me headed on over to Joe’s Bakery, poetry makes you hungry as hell.
Oscar ate two or three orders of carne guisada, I ordered the Mexican pancakes.
Two weeks later we set out to Michoacan, but ended up in Acapulco. Enjoying
the sun and the women. We’d get drunk every night, and head to the exotic bars
where women in their thirties or forties would have sex with great danes. After
a few weeks of this, we headed up to Mazatlan which was a sleepy little town
back then. In some back alley, we bought marijuana from these dark Mexicans
who tried to cheat us, but Oscar beat the crap out of them. Their girlish gritos
were nothing like Father Hidalgo’s. Soon it was time for me to head back to
Texas, unlike Oscar I had a job and family, a brand new daughter who I was now
missing badly. It was the last time I saw Oscar, and probably the last time he
saw me.

Ironically, these two brothers Oscar beat up went on to found the Tiburones
Cartel which was the forerunner of Mexican drug cartels. They grew their dope
on the island of Tiburon, which in English would be Shark Island. It’s located
in the sea between Baja California and mainland Mexico. When I left Mazatlan
I accidently put Oscar’s army jacket in my duffle bag (didn’t use suitcase back then)
and I still have it somewhere in my garage here in Gringolandia, where my
neighbors work for Google, Apple or teach at Berkeley.


The Apple Store

My Ipod Touch
is made by ten year old kids in China

while Steve Jobs
heads to the front

of the liver transplant line.
That’s what I call backbone,

that’s what I call spine-----
there’s an app for that!

Malcriado

When there was a death in the family,
grandma covered the mirror with a sheet,

told us boys we couldn’t watch tv
for a thousand years,

said, don’t turn on the radio either.
I questioned myself sarcastically,

can I scratch the sun’s round ball,
can I look into the naked, virgin moon?

And sure enough when grandma went
to the wake or the funeral,

I’d turn on the tv
and keep a good eye on the driveway,

lest I be surprised---
Dios and God not being equal.

In Search Of Aztlān

Perhaps Andres Montoya was right,
maybe Aztlān is nowhere to be found,

the San Andreas Fault
just another Los Angeles barrio street.

The evil in Mexican kids inherited from the wind
says El Louie Rodriguez,

are we oblivious to a grandmother
craving crack in white rain,

and purple cops busting
a thirteen year old hooker for themselves?

El Plan Espiritual de Aztlān,
has become the National Enquirer,

Alurista almost run over by a taco truck
which buys protection from Los Bobo Kings.

Canine Haiku

A dog was throwing rocks
at a glass house.

Wow!

For Cecilio Garcia-Camarillo

I can not stand your silence,
what you would have thought

of this or that hungry poet,
what New Mexican sky

would be enough for you,
what fine desert sand

you would welcome into your house,
what dark mountains you’d climb

(Aztlan perhaps just out of reach)
the sun blazing

in an Aztec dawn,
the enemy high-tailing it out of town,

you hot on their trail
to offer mercy.

Homage To A Young And Horny
William Carlos Williams

so much depends
upon

a naked girl's
red panties

and white bra
tossed

on a loveseat
from the floor