Poems By Adela Najarro

My Litany of Scars 

“The wound is the place where the Light enters you.” 
—Rumi 

On the path that kept burning was my heart. 
The Divine knocked on the door 

not once or twice, but continuously, 
so I asked about the scar on my shin, 

kicked by a foot 
kicked by a foot in a shoe 
kicked by a foot in a shoe with cleats 
how will the light enter? 

I asked about the faint echoes on my arms 
left by tape 
left by tape wrapped round 
left by duct tape wrapped round and round 
the tearing sound 
so I couldn’t move 
so I stayed in place 
how will the light enter? 

There are ridges on my ears 
bitten 
bitten by teeth 
bitten by teeth that belonged  
bitten by teeth that belonged to a man 
who claimed the label husband, 
a husband beastie 
with sharp sharp teeth 
how will the light enter? 

On the path that kept burning was my heart. 
The Divine knocked on the door 

not once or twice, but continuously 
and the light entered 

through a dried leaf shriveled brown 
how it moved 
how it moved with wind 
how it moved with wind and skittled scuttled 
across an ordinary sidewalk 

past a broken piece of glass 
a piece of trash, forgotten in the morning 
a piece of forgotten trash 
on a cold morning where the clear sky 
no longer hurt so I closed my eyes 

and the light entered. 

Credo  

I believe in the sun and moon Orion in the sky 
that light shining through broken glass overcomes evil 
that the cooling waters of the ocean heals 

that most people try that those who hurt others  
cannot see into themselves       

I believe in making pacts and prayers and ofrendas 
that a flower’s beauty never dies but stays  
to fortify and strengthen  that when we love more 
than one person the universe speaks to us in dreams 

in dreams the afterlife is just those who have hurt others 
are forgiven even so        I believe it would be all right   
to lock them up for a good long time  
in a place without light dank empty  

I believe in my mother’s love that my father 
held me close in a crooked way that when it rains 
he falls through sky and waits as water on a leaf 

I believe water heals every day   that the moon shines 
through a skylight just for me that the sun’s corona 
clears smog from the air and from my lungs 

I believe that I can breathe clear even in the most trying times 
a cloud weaves a wave rolls stones crumble 
if a piece of broken glass shines on the sidewalk 

and a wind catches one loose leaf I believe 
love stays that heaven and hell are microcosms 
within ourselves the afterlife is just a star \

in Orion’s belt in the vacuum of the universe      

I believe in one breath  

more 

---

Adela Najarro

Adela Najarro is the author of three poetry collections: Split Geography, Twice Told Over and My Childrens, a chapbook with teaching resources where students explore creative writing, identity, and what it means to be Latinx in US society. She teaches creative writing, literature, and composition at Cabrillo College. More information about Adela can be found at her website: www.adelanajarro.com.

Poems By Sister Lou Ella Hickman

when summer shines 

more than wheat glitters  

as the sun dazzles it ripe 

with wind bending  

water glitters into iridescence 

as birds skim across its luster 

leaves glitter green into a sheen 

as they sigh  

over sleeping things 

all is ripe 

Life comes to every harvest 

shimmering  

   the texas star 

      cooperia pedunculata
 (also known as the hill country rain lily)                               

                           i 

after  
spring/early summer rain 
it  
rises    blooms  
small  moon white  
on a slender green stalk 
along the highway  
a star 

ii 

a barbed-wire fence
protects a field 
where a sky of stars 
fell the night before 
and stayed 

the moon: who is she, really 

       i 

the setting sun whispered the latest rumor 

            your beloved   the moon   

            woos with her shinning flesh 

the white tipped tides   

i wept . . .  

             another she the ocean a body
the moon also loves? 

      ii 

could the moon be a twin 

who sheds her skin and blood 

like mine 

as she slowly counts one to twenty-eight  

iii 

            perhaps the moon             

                                    is an old woman who empties her purse . . . 

                              as she counts her coins  

        she measures out her change 

o 

               so carefully  

               for     each     dark     night 

---

Sister Lou Ella Hickman

Sister Lou Ella has a master’s in theology from St. Mary’s University in San Antonio and is a former teacher and librarian. She is a certified spiritual director as well as a poet and writer. Her poems have appeared in numerous magazines and four anthologies.

Two Poems By Lara Gularte

ILLUMINATION 

            Upon viewing the painting, Personal Rise, 
                                            by artist, Stan Padilla 

A woman dreams face up to the universe, 
wishes for the return of her ancestors, 
hears the murmur of their voices. 
Through open windows they spill in, 
pour down on her as stars. 

The moon in the east window fills her with power, 
and her strength increases with earthshine. 
Sudden radiance, her heart crystalline. 
A whirlwind of ancestors spins her into the air, 
gravitational forces pull on her. 

Find her- 
among a constellation of shiny stones.  

This poem was previously published online with other work from the Escritores Del Nuevo Sol Ekphrastic Poetry Workshop.

TRAVELING MY YARD DURING TIMES OF PANDEMIC 

Under a lowering sky,  
light shifts through tree branches,  
pierces deep shade.  

A gravid doe under the Blue Oak. 

Emergence from amniotic shell, 
placenta of plenty, the breath, the bleating, 

a coming of life, 
spotted, tawny, long-legged.  

View from the bough, 
a moment of union with doe and fawn. 

Beyond these dark days,  
my heart fed with divine immunity. 

---

Lara Gularte

Lara Gularte lives and writes in the Sierra Foothills of California and she is El Dorado County Poet Laureate 2021-2023. Her book of poetry, Kissing the Bee, was published by “The Bitter Oleander Press,” in 2018. Her forthcoming book, Fourth World Woman, published by “Finishing Line Press, will be available January 2023. Nominated for several Pushcart Prizes, Gularte has been published in national and international journals and anthologies. Her poetry depicting her Azorean heritage is included in the The Gávea-Brown Book of Portuguese-American Poetry, and in Writers of the Portuguese Diaspora in the United States and Canada.  She is affiliated with the Cagarro Colloquium: Azorian Diaspora Writers, at the Portuguese Beyond Borders Institute (PBBI), California State University-Fresno. In 2017 Gularte traveled to Cuba with a delegation of American poets and presented her poetry at the Festival Internacional de Poesia de la Habana. She’s a proud member of the esteemed, “Escritores Del Nuevo Sol.”  Gularte is a creative writing instructor for Arts in Corrections at Mule Creek prison.

A Poem By Victoria Bañales

Santa Barbara’s Summer Heat 

Cabrillo Boulevard 
—wide stretch of glorious beach. 
This is where you find 
sandy shores, palm trees 
sunny rays, ocean scent. 
Sailboats that float, like clouds 
dreamy views, waterfront hotels 
seafood and ice-cream on the wharf 
pompous yachts parading the docks 
—look at the blazing sunset!  
Skies on fire. 

 State Street 
—live entertainment, places to eat. 
This is where you find 
restaurants, bars, boutiques 
revel in the city’s colonial past 
summer’s anticipation: Old Spanish Days. 
Forget about Indians and Mexicans 
enjoy mariachi music, perform a hat dance 
crack confetti eggs, drink tequila. Laugh 
—look at the flamenco dancers!  
Crowds on fire. 

 Milpas Street 
—forgotten fields, centuries ago. 
This is where you feel the heat 
find “authentic” Mexican food. 
Adventurers trail off the beaten path: 
stained cracked sidewalks 
mom and pop Mexican shops 
gas station, liquor store 
laundromat, dollar store 
—look at the Mexican lowrider!  
Cops on fire. 

 Alphonse Street 
—twin blocks, over-stuffed lots. 
This is where? You will never know 
invisible ramshackle houses groan 
sunbaked women hunch over eggshells 
careful not to crack the fragile whites 
paint, stuff, cut. Beneath a giving tree 
chain-link fence, ruptured and bent 
black-eyed Susans, bougainvilleas ablaze 
—look at the exotic flowers!  
Mami’s eyes on fire. 

---

Victoria Bañales

Victoria Bañales is a Chicanx writer, teacher, mother, and activist. She is the founder and editor of Xinachtli Journal—Journal X—a literary/arts magazine focused on social justice issues. A 2021 Macondo Fellow, her writing has appeared in various anthologies and journals, including Translocalities/Translocalidades: Feminist Politics of Translation in the Latin/a Américas, Beyond the Frame: Women of Color and Visual Representations, North Dakota Quarterly, The Acentos Review, Cloud Women’s Quarterly Journal, and more. Victoria is a member of the Hive Poetry Collective, Writers of Color Collective-Santa Cruz County, and the recipient of the 2020 Porter Gulch Review Best Poetry Award. She holds a Ph.D. in Literature and Feminist Studies from UC-Santa Cruz and teaches English at Cabrillo College in Santa Cruz County.

A Poem By Robin Carstensen

Say it Anyway 

                           Mother toed the straight and narrow  

           while you pined for her face  

                                    gleaming at you, you,                         

                    her glistening port,     

then raised your sail  

                          for the vast green realm.  

        You’ve summoned your mother  

                                        to bear your whole life  

                          it’s her  

                    you’ve been calling  

from swollen temple  

                 to burning feet  

                             where even brown eels  

                  lay their eggs,   

build their homes  

                  among sea anemones  

                                             and turrets,  

                               and all our swashbuckling  

                    and clanging  

                            swords, our bodies shedding  

        their dutiful cells  

                         on the naked shore  

                                                    for her heavenly gaze 

                   couldn’t fill the longing  

                                                 ebb and flow  

                                    everywhere  

                                 you weren’t,  

                                               she was  

                                                            a marsh 

                                                  I was 

                       a fen, there was her name  

and mine, then 

                 the wide lower course, open sea 

                  a cove and coral reefs, rain 

                           of stars, wave, crest 

             curling under, the taut  

          close, the whispering 

                                                       efferent force        

        pulling, the terrible  

            cry of gull, the say it  

                                           anyway 

                                                  I’ll never leave you 

                                                                                    anywhere 

                                                                           we clamber on 

                                                             unmoored.

---

Robin Carstensen

Robin is Switchgrass Review Co-founder and Senior Editor. Her chapbook, In the Temple of Shining Mercy, is the recipient of an annual first-place award by Iron Horse Literary Press and was published in 2017. Poems also appear in BorderSenses, Southern Humanities Review, Voices de La Luna, Demeter Press’s anthology, Borderlands, and Crossroads: Writing the Motherland, and many more. She directs the creative writing program at Texas A&M University-CC where she also advises The Windward Review: a literary journal of the South Texas Coastal Bend.

Poems by Violeta Orozco

 THE MIDNIGHT AIR 

“The subterranean 
beginnings of all light” 
—June Jordan 

A poet with the name  
of a summer month believed 
in bodies that stirred up the oceans: 
a blind writing  
upon the finger’s shore. 
Only now, 
in the intimate silence 
can I finally say your name.  
I am only  
a floating plant 
heaving in the current. 
The rocks rub against each other 
carving the sand 
into a dwindling cave.  
I don’t have 
a single word of solace 
for the dying crowds  
that follow 
the trajectory of the wave. 
Can we only remember 
our hands touching as the light 
dissolves into the air? 
The night is still, I know that you are close 
like a thought I put away, 
 saved for later. 
That day has also slipped behind 
and I can mourn 
what has come back, altered, 
a friendly gesture 
in a burning hand.  
I have weakened, slightly 
waiting for the tired tide. 
I too, want to rest and remember  
and forget 
we were once here 
waiting uncertain 
among the hollow leaves. 
A cockroach nestles  
somewhere in the room, we all 
live accompanied 
by our foreign ghosts.  
And why then, I wonder 
do I see you as a tree 
I can rest my head upon? 
spreading myself out 
like a flowing field 
onto a mindless sky. 

SOOTHSAYER: Murmurador de Alivio

“Our stories are so holy 
we refuse to share them 
with non-believers 
until we find 
those that understand” — Mario Pagán Morales 

 It will be long before I find the center of the world 
the place that opens up  
when the eyes shut down 
gaze into the internal night. 
May we find a place to share the voice 
that was denied to us 
may we find a prayer that works 
a song that heals 
the body of the soothsayer. 
Our stories are not fully ours 
unless we share them.  
May we not speak in soliloquy  
I do not monologue alone if my tongue  
branches out like an ivy  
curls into other branches  
crawls into ancient forests 
where the sound is curled up into itself 
guarded by a thin membrane of silence  
like a shut-eyed frog 
creeping under the leaf  
the canopy towering above him 
a small brown body 
under a layer of soil 
Nobody will suppress the deep 
croaking of the growing song 
rising gradually above the  
hum of the ocean  
leaking into the rocks 
receding  
like the song of the coquí in the forest 
drawing the ear deep into the eons 
behind the green curtain   
the blue orb exploding 
into the deep abyss of the eye.

---

Violeta  Orozco

Violeta  Orozco is the author of three poetry collections: "El cuarto de la luna" (Proyecto Literal 2020),  "As Seen By Night/La edad oscura" (Nueva  York Poetry Press, forthcoming), "The Broken Woman Diaries" (Andante  Books, forthcoming), available for presale https://www.andantebooks.com/store1/The-Broken-Woman-Diaries-p130175617. A bilingual writer and freelance translator from Mexico City, she translates Chicana and Latina writers for Nueva York Poetry Review. A Ph.D. scholar of Chicanx and Latina literature at University of Cincinnati, she seeks to restore the fractured links  between the broken bones and languages of the Americas. Her poetry in English has been published or is forthcoming from Acentos Review, Label Me Latina, Harvard College's Palabritas, Bozalta, MALCS journal and Latinx anthologies like Nuestra Realidad Creativa Anthology. She currently lives in Cincinnati.

Two Poems By Andrena Zawinski

Summer Haibun  

The summer’s long light fills with bright lemons, melons, corn,  

all the silken thoughts. It languishes under a splashy beach umbrella  

with dominoes and Scrabble, with children digging fingers and toes  

into sand where facets of sunlight bead cascades along windy waves,  

run of shorebirds sweeping the horizon before the gray cityscape. 

This summer is for a young mother jostling her baby in low tide as we  

doze off on the soft lull of water lapping the shore, under a feathered sky  

of oncoming sunset. This is the time of day when curtains billow  

at windows in soft light, when sun squints through above a rippling bay,  

when summer knocks at the door and we answer, 

the wail of seagulls 

winging wild above a catch 

eyes fixed past us 

---

She, sister who reads this poem 

…I know you are reading this poem because there is nothing else  
left to read / there where you have landed… —Adrienne Rich 

I imagine you standing at the stove on a breathy night before  
an open window, breeze flirting crisp white kitchen curtains, 
one hand at the hip, the other stirring soup, tasting, adding  
a bit of basil and lemon thyme. Imagine you musing about 
this poem as it quiets like a child off in the next room into  
something. Something taking your attention, startling, stirring  
outside the lines of unshorn weeds choking flowering sage  
you will get to once you have read this poem again, rising  
from bed, words blurring your eyes in a half-wake state,  
some foggy mess of meaning you chase after and cannot catch.  

I imagine you, she who reads this poem, stirring toward the day  
ahead, alone and unafraid, surefooted along a sandy beach, past 
sandcastles, shells, tossed limbs and bulbs of seaweed at your feet,  
all part of the poem. Imagine another woman, the invisible one  
pushing a broom through dusk lit halls, poem in the pocket of a  
cleaning cart next to disinfectant spray. And the borrowed woman,  
poem tucked at the back of a stroller rolled out to the walk, she 
reading this poem at water’s edge, arms flung wide to morning.  

I imagine you, sister who reads this poem, braving a ridgeline along  
the bay on your own, poem pulled from a backpack at night’s campfire  
then carted carefully back to the pup tent like a child quieted, 
belly full of hobo stew and s’mores. Like a wind so soft it passes  
barely noticed across a piney wood, I imagine you, she who reads  
this poem, barely stirring yet part of the poem, its fire and its flames. 

---

Andrena Zawinski

Andrena Zawinski’s most recent poetry collection is Landings. Her writing has received accolades for free verse, form, lyricism, spirituality, social concern. Her fourth book of poems, Born Under the Influence, is forthcoming in 2022 along with Plumes, a collection of flash fiction. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area where she founded and runs the popular Women’s Poetry Potluck and Salon.