PoetryMagazine.com
Since 1996 Volume XXI
Alejandro Murguía
USA
Since 1996 Volume XXI
Alejandro Murguía
USA
| Alejandro Murguía is the author of Southern Front and This War Called Love (both winners of the American Book Award). His non-fiction book The Medicine of Memory highlights the Mission District in the 1970s during the Nicaraguan Solidarity movement. He is a founding member and the first director of The Mission Cultural Center. He was a founder of The Roque Dalton Cultural Brigade, and co-editor of Volcán: Poetry From Central America. Currently he is a professor in Latina Latino Studies at San Francisco State University. He is the author of the short story “The Other Barrio” which first appeared in the anthology San Francisco Noir and recently filmed in the street of the Mission District. In poetry he has published Spare Poems, and this year a new collection Native Tongue. In Spring 2014 City Lights Books will release his new collection of poetry Stray Poems. He is the Sixth San Francisco Poet Laureate and the first Latino poet to hold the position. |
Parker’s Mood
Naha, Okinawa
For raúlrsalinas
Sax man blows
wild riffs that
feel like home
wayfarer lost in
alleys and backstreets
of Naha
“Nights in Tunisia”
in my rum
guitarist strums
where is home
old sailor
where the pillow
to sleep strange dreams
I’m Mexican Ulises
washed upon
foreign shores
messages reach me via transpacific
meta-telepathic wave
lengths of them solid
beats
of poets long gone like
jazz greats
Parker, Coltrane, Miles
here in groovy club where
island
spirits mix with Chicano
alma
that knows the rhythm of
this or that
clipped to stirring neon
red & yellow
glowing in Naha alleys
where time
spills from my cup
and I toast this coast
joined to hip of this
other shore
with blue notes strung
in the smoke of this
jazzy
jazzy
hip along
strip of melancholy
who knows what.
Another Voice Speaking
Somewhere between
night’s chaos
And dawn’s bitter glow
Your fingertips fold hours
into minutes
And a man waits at the end of
a street
For something, someone
Somewhere a voice calls
An echo of another time—a
land
Cupped in a sound that
lingers
At the edge of consciousness,
Somnambulistic
—a name without a name—
something in the air
a clock ticking backwards
towards the sea
a moment when life sleeps
and death opens a door
through a wall
we never suspect is waiting
for us
Lorca’s Dream
They tell me that your
clavicle
is a star over Andalucia
that your melancholic
metacarpals
still clutch a clod of earth
in Sevilla
that your hips have not
ceased dancing
in La Habana and in New York
that jasmines bloom in your
eye sockets
and every petal a poem
that your jaw bone is the
voice of all
the silenced ones, the
undocumented ones
those insulted and executed
that the moon cradles your
bones Fedérico
fragile as hummingbird wings
That’s what I was told one
silvery night
by the hip red ants
that sleep in your cranium
“Lorca’s Dream” first appeared in Native Tongue,
C.C. Marimbo Press, Berkeley, 2013
© Copyright, 2013,
Alejandro Murguia.
All rights reserved.
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