hands that labor

i got into martin espada's poetry class @ umass this fall. it'll be my first workshop-based creative writing course since coming to hampshire. i'm pretty excited about it :) especially with espada's extremely fast response to my submissions--three poems to get into the class. i sent them, he wrote back saying he couldn't open the documents (>.<), i re-sent them as pdfs, he wrote back like two hours later welcoming me into the class. can't preregister, but he said he'd save me a spot =)

*yay* this is what i so need. so far it looks like (for the fall) i'm taking asian american women writers @ smith with floyd cheung (FLOYD CHEUNG!), asian american history @ mt. holyoke with richard chu (as a foundational course for the APA program), and martin espada's class. not sure about a 4th class. perhaps i should take at least one hampshire class. i'd love to do an independent study with rachel, but she isn't gonna be teaching in the fall; so we'd have to do it in the spring--which would, actually, be a nice 'capstone' div ii project.

well for now, here are some martin espada poems that i like, to celebrate:


Who Burns for the Perfection of Paper

At sixteen, I worked after high school hours
at a printing plant
that manufactured legal pads:
Yellow paper stacked seven feet high
and leaning
as I slipped cardboard
between the pages,
then brushed red glue
up and down the stack.
No gloves: fingertips required
for the perfection of paper,
smoothing the exact rectangle.
Sluggish by 9 PM, the hands
would slide along suddenly sharp paper,
and gather slits thinner than the crevices
of the skin, hidden.
Then the glue would sting,
hands oozing
till both palms burned
at the punchclock.

Ten years later, in law school,
I knew that every legal pad
was glued with the sting of hidden cuts,
that every open lawbook
was a pair of hands
upturned and burning.

*

Sing Zapatista

March 6, 2001
Tepoztlán, State of Morelos, México

Sing the word Tepoztlán, Place of Copper,
pueblo of cobblestone and purple blossoms
amid the cliffs, serpent god ablaze with plumage
peering from the shaven rock.

Sing the word Zapata, bandoliers crossing his chest
like railroad tracks about to explode, rebellion's black iris
in 1910, in his eye the peasants of Morelos husking rifles
stalk by stalk from the cornfields.

Sing the word Zapatista, masked rebels riding now
in a caravan without rifles, tracking the long rosary of blood
beaded and stippled across the earth by other rebels the color of earth,
bus panting uphill saddled with ghosts dangling legs from the roof.

Sing the words Félix Serdán, age eleven when he straddled the horse
to ride with Zapata, witness to a century's harvest of campesino skulls
abundant as melons, twined in white mustache and blanket
beside the comandantes on the platform.

Sing the word comandante, twenty-three of the faceless
masked in black so their brown skin could grow eyes and mouths,
smuggling Mayan tongues to the microphone in the plaza
where the church drowses in dreams of Latin by rote.

Sing the word durito, hard little one, scarab on a banner
draped across the face of the church where bells bang
to welcome the rebels, as the scarab-people cluster below
shouting their vow never to be crushed by the shoe.

Sing the word zapateado, tap and stamp of women dancing in the plaza
to the hummingbird rhythms of Veracruz, guitarist in fedora
watching his fingers skitter like scarabs across the wood,
shawled dancer lost in the percussion of her feet.

Sing the word Marcos, el Subcomandante, and listen
when he says above the crowd chanting his name:

Marcos does not exist. I am a window. I am a mirror.
I am you. You are me.

*

Heart of Hunger

Smuggled in boxcars through fields of dark morning,
tied to bundles at railroad crossings,
the brown grain of faces dissolved in bus station dim,
immigrants: mexicano, dominicano,
guatemalteco, puertorriqueño, orphans and travelers,
refused permission to use gas station toilets,
beaten for a beer in unseen towns with white porches,
or evaporated without a tombstone in the peaceful grass,
a centipede of hands moving,
hands clutching infants that grieve,
fingers to the crucifix,
hands that labor.

Long past backroads paved with solitude,
hands in the thousands reach for the crop-ground together,
the countless roots of a tree lightning-torn,
capillaries running to a heart of hunger,
tobaccopicker, grapepicker, lettucepicker.

Obscured in the towering white clouds of cities in winter,
thousands are bowing to assembly lines,
frenzied in kitchens and sweatshops,
mopping the vomit of others' children,
leaning into the iron's steam
and the steel mill glowing.

Yet there is a pilgrimage,
a history straining its arms and legs,
an inexorable striving,
shouting in Spanish
at the police of city jails
and border checkpoints,
mexicano, dominicano,
guatemalteco, puertorriqueño,
fishermen wading into the North American gloom
to pull a fierce gasping life
from the polluted current.

**

plus:
~check out his official website.
~watch a nice interview & reading.
~"i am here to talk about...america with an accent." another talk + reading.