(forthcoming) WOMEN STUDIES QUARTERLY: “Birthing the Warrior” (essay on poetry)

(forthcoming) HUIZACHE: Small sampling of poems, selected by Dagoberto Gilb

(forthocming) ANTHOLOGY OF TEJANA POETS: Sampling of creative & critical work, edited by  Norma Cantu and Sonia Saldivar-Hull

PALABRA: "My Mother Woke a Rooster" & "Ode to My Boots"

Borderlands: The Texas Poetry Review:
Review of Valerie Martinez's Each and Her

Boxcar Review: Review of J.Michael Martinez's Heredities & Interview with the poet
http://www.boxcarpoetry.com/027/review_j_michael_martinez_guerrero.html
http://www.boxcarpoetry.com/027/interview_j_michael_martinez_guerrero.html

Acentos Review: "Preparing the Tongue," My Mother Will Take a Lover," "Cocooning"
http://www.acentosreview.com/February_2011/Guerrero.html

Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review: "Put Attention"

Global City Review: "The Way She Sees It"

chapbook, BABIES UNDER THE SKIN (Panhandler Publishing, 2008)

Feminist Studies: "Babies Under the House" and "Babies Under the Skin"
http://www.feministstudies.org/issues/vol-30-39/34-1-2.html

MERIDIANS: feminism, race, transnationalism (forthcoming): "How I Put Myself Through School"
https://muse.jhu.edu/journals/meridians/summary/v009/9.1.guerrero.html

The Weight of Addition: an Anthology of Texas Poets (Mutabilis Press, 2007): "Las Lenguas"
http://www.mutabilispress.org/TWOA.htm

Texas Poetry Calendar 2008: "High Noon and Texas Beckons"
http://www.dosgatospress.org/store.html

Silkworm: "The Dionicio Martinez Land Grant of 1834 & Other Things We Don't Question"

Palo Alto Review: "Texas in the Fall," "Late or Very Early," "Sundays After Breakfast"

Literary Mama: "As I Walk"
http://www.literarymama.com/poetry/archives/

BorderSenses: "Los Americanos"

Texas Poetry Calendar 2007: "Remember the Alamo: Texas-Born Mexicans"

Culturas, San Antonio Express News: "As I Walk"  and "Leaving Grandpa"

Voices Along the River, anthology "Star-Spangled Momma"

Echoes of Yesterday, anthology "Sixteen"  

WOODEN BOX    

He demands this. Nothing

else.  No mahogany slick,

or roses kissed by lilies.  No

music or speech.  Weeping,

limited.  We are to file down

the aisle, nod head to his dead

body, return home to care for things

still living.  We are not

to sob for the child

him, the bed- and alphabet-less

picker of cotton,

 potatoes, tomatoes.

Follower of crops.

We are not to sob for the cactusman-

vaquero-lover him. Grandpa

who takes his milk from the moon,

who knows the time

for cookie,

 the time for wine,

no.

When he is gone,

he will be gone.

I can make the box

myself, he says.

I can make it myself.





first published in Naugutuck River Riview

LAS LENGUAS, uno

Once, a man told me

to hear the voice of God

one must first be able to speak

in tongues. 

Years later, another man

told me speaking in tongues

was the kind of sin

you couldn’t hide.

Who knows what the priest

told my mother when, with a quivering

chin, she pleaded, Por favor, padre,

necesito ir al baño, squeezing

her tiny six-year-old  thighs

together in the best English

she could muster.

                   


                                         first published in The Weight of Addition: An Anthology of Texas Poets

BABIES UNDER THE HOUSE

In Memoriam: Siblings,

Sariyah Garcia, fourteen months old

& Sebastian Lopez, four months old

San Antonio, Texas, March 2007

When you open your eyes again, Sariyah,

this’ll just be one of those things— like rice and bean

tacos every night, having to go 

to the free clinic, buying gas with food stamps

at Ben’s Ice House at the corner of Pleasanton

and Petaluma. But you know that, don’t you,

know that your body will never grow completely?

When you open your eyes, your skin will be smooth

as the day you were born, not what it was

when they found you and the tiny thing

that was your brother. The dirt around you

will have licked away mother’s milk

from your lips, absorbed the sour scent of mother’s

breath on your neck. The iron-heavy taste of blood

in your mouth, you won’t even remember.

When you open your eyes again, Sariyah,

you will be the mother. Your tart Mexican heart

won’t let you be anything else.

No need for grownups—Child Protective Services

who were too busy, the legislators who couldn’t give

medication, education to this poor neighborhood,

this city, La Raza with no muscle, no voice. Hope

decomposing in a couple plastic bags. But there are two

things you will have that your mother never did: 

a whole Sariyah, a whole Sebastian.







first published in FEMINIST STUDIES

                         

                        PUT ATTENTION

Put attention, grandma would say, as if attention

            were a packet of salt to be sprinkled, or a mound

                        we could scoop out of a carton like ice cream.

Put attention, put attention. Put it where? In her hands? 

            In the Percolator? On top of the television set

                        that seeps fat red lips and Mexican moustaches? 

Next to the jade Buddha? Between La Virgen and cousin

            Pablo’s sixth grade class photo—marshmallowy teeth

                        jumping out of his mouth? We never corrected her.

Like the breast, Spanish lulled grandma’s tongue, as we threw

            down shards of English for her to leap in and around,

                        laughing. Put attention, put attention.  Put it where?

Shall I put attention in my glass and drink it soft like Montepulciano

            d’Abruzzo? Like Shiner Bock? Horchata? Put attention.

                        Ponga atención, she tried to say in our language.

Put attention somewhere large. Back into her eyes. In the part of her

            brain that doesn’t remember her own daughters,

                        how to make rice, how to translate instructions.

                                                             

                                                          first published in BORDERLANDS: The Texas Poetry Review

    SUNDAYS AFTER BREAKFAST:

    A Lesson in Cotton Picking

                                South Texas, 1943

    It was a kind of dance: feet

    shuffling in dust, fluttering

    hands like birds: nest-building.

    Blood staining brown birds

    red.  Cotton sacks, twelve feet long,

    dragging behind like a tongue—fat

    and slow as sun. I watch him pick

    my grandma by the color of her dress

    and eyes, and because she's lucky,

    not by how much cotton she can pick.





    An earlier version of this poem was first published in Palo Alto Review.