Poems By Alejandro Murguía 1x4l3t

poems by

Alejandro Murguía Nature always tells the truth I come with my songs to clean the wounds Like wind thru the redwoods I’m the hum of the hummingbird The color of the red-tail hawk There’s a jaguar within that prowls the city streets Hunting for a poem The riddle of the blue jay is my pen The majesty of the condor my ink I’m the river, I’m the rain The grizzly bear’s paw The courage of the wolf and the cunning of coyote I’m the cactus, the nopal, the agave With its sweet mescal I’m the seashell on the shore that listens to your woes

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The tsunami washing away that same shore The storm that’s coming—the hurricane Beware Pacha Mama Because only you give us life And the corporations give us death You give us beauty and they turn it to trash So I burn sage to cloud up their plans I blow copal to confuse their midnight conferences I offer cedar to protect all the four-legged and the two-legged Pacha Mama to the four directions Pacha Mama to the center, the balance For the children And the children waiting to be born

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Diablo Moon He stands at bar fingers split with cigarette smoke unfurling from his mouth an angry Mixtec god scratching the mahogany plank the brawls and prison still ahead

one hand around his neck at 75 miles an hour and that’s when she crashed the crimson Mustang twisting it around an oak tree on Highway 4 at the foot of Mount Diablo the explosion singed their eyelashes and the five years of rage that followed

He was 19 scorched as the hills behind him She was 28—ancient llorona-mama-baby in blue jeans and leather jacket come to set him free or on fire after they escaped fleeing her square husband in Pinole the beers and oldies looped around his heart tying his memories to her hand on the wheel drunk on plum wine making out as she drove

La Mentira Because when you said that you couldn’t see me I knew it was a lie And you knew I knew it was a lie— So your lie was pretty much the truth, wasn’t it?

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Mission Noir

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he first time I saw her was in a café and she looked strikingly like someone I’d had an affair with 25 years ago. The following day I saw her again—but this time sitting in a class I was teaching on the theory of genome sequencing. As the hour and fifteen minutes of my introductory lecture dragged by—I felt her eyes on me constantly, seducing, her knees slightly parted as she sat in the front row. At the end of class—I asked them to write down in two or three sentences why I should let them stay when there was a waiting list of over fifty undergraduates. When she turned in her paper—there were no comments, and no name only a phone number. That alone should have warned me but I’m the type of man who es buses on a blind curve if you know what I’m talking about.

After my last class I sat in my office and called the number. Her voice answered but it was a machine—the message was clear. She would be at the end of Dolores Park, where the train runs. I had come to this spot with this other woman—whom I’ll call Laura—we had made out made many times in the under, and once even made love while the J train with all its sleepy engers headed to Noe Valley rushed overhead. We were young obviously. I didn’t understand the attraction to the younger version of this other woman whom I’ll call Laura. The young version—had an entirely different last name—I had seen it in the roll sheet, though her face was a twin of that woman whom I had treated badly, very badly during our time together. Not surprisingly this version of the woman I knew as Laura stepped out of the darkness of Dolores Park into the nimbus glow of the streetlamps and casually opened the door of my car and slid into the seat beside me. She didn’t look at me but straight ahead and I could see by her profile, so elegant, that this was Laura, or another version of Laura, or even her daughter. She turned to face me and slowly, very slowly unbuttoned the white silk blouse she was wearing. She was naked underneath. Her breasts were exactly like Laura’s—which froze me. Don’t touch she said—I just want you to see. I stared for a long time—minutes maybe—before I raised my eyes. I had to ask her if she was Laura’s daughter but I knew the answer was staring me in the face. A silver plated derringer aimed between my eyes. And she said, just before pulling the trigger—From a woman you will never forget.

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Alejandro Murguía is the author This War Called Love (City Lights Books, winner of the American Book Award,) and The Medicine of Memory: A Mexica Clan in California, University of Texas Press. Currently he is a professor in Latina Latino Studies at San Francisco State University. Last year City Lights Books released his new book Stray Poems. In May 2014 SF Weekly named him Best Local Author. He is the Sixth San Francisco Poet Laureate and the first Latino to hold the post. alejan drom urguia. org

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