Issue 26 Poetry

Picket Line Baby

By AIDEED MEDINA 

White women give my father shaded looks.
Bringing babies to do their dirty work,
mumbled in passing.
 
I am paid in jelly doughnuts
for my day on the boycott.
 
My dad leads my baby brother
to the front of the grocery store doors
for a meeting with the manager:
two men
and a five-year-old interpreter.

Picket Line Baby
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Sisters

By MIGUEL M. MORALES
with Deb Morales, MyLinda Morales Hutchings, Grace Morales

I grew up in a farmworking family.
No, that’s not accurate—it’s incomplete.
I grew up in a family of farmworking women.
The hands of our sisters, tías, cousins, mothers,
and abuelas have worked the fields, worked to feed us,
worked to raise us, worked to protect and provide for us.
I love my mom but the truth is that my sisters raised me.
Farmwork would not survive without women,
nor would farmworker families.

Sisters
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Double Infinity

By MARIA TERRONE

On 88th, the street where I lived as a girl when an hour could seem an eternity, it would be years before I met the young man who pointed out that those numbers, turned on their sides, had a special meaning. What meaning? I wondered and pondered the two unbroken loops pinched at their centers, forever returning to themselves like a pair of ice skaters tracing figure eights into a state of bliss. I wondered if he thought that love is infinite, that our souls will live forever, that sky even on crystalline days moves into unseeable endless space. I was thinking that the iris of his hazel eyes pulled me into a place where I could feel lost or float before thought was possible, as if in vitro. I no longer live on 88th Street, having left double infinity in its impossible realm. Because infinity cannot be multiplied or divided—infinity just is. Still, I was grateful that I didn’t live on Main Street or Elm, and the young man I married found meaning on that finite block in Queens where he found me.

Double Infinity
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Re(education)

By LIZBETH LUEVANO

in the coachella valley
children go to school and learn how to internalize silence
girls sit pretty with pigtails wrapped in bubble-ball hair ties
learn how to cast their eyes downward
so that when they ask the class what do you want to be when you grow up?
boys respond, i want to work in the fields like my dad

Re(education)
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Guinea Pig Suite

By JONATHAN MOODY

      I.      Lexapro
 
Like a booster detached from a shuttle, my body 
Ended up in an ocean while fog enshrouded my mind. 
Xanax never made me feel that unsteady; it just didn’t
Agree with Lamictal. I was glad my wife could cease 
Preparing herself mentally before coming home; I’d been a
Rakshasa for months & appeared to be normal
Overnight, but the low dose made me immune to emotion.

Guinea Pig Suite
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