What I wrote at Acentos yesterday!

The Acentos Writers' Workshops is an intergenerational, multicultural workshop series that happens every Sunday at Hostos Community College in the Bronx, with different facilitators each week.

For more information on how to participate, or to inquire about facilitating a workshop, please contact Fish Vargas at fish@louderarts.com.

This draft is about as rough as it gets, but it comes to you courtesy of a series of generative prompts from today's workshop leader, poet Erica Miriam Fabri, whose first book DIALECT OF A SKIRT is due out on Hanging Loose Press in November of 2009.

More to come quite soon from the good folks at Acentos, including news about our soon-to-be-returning reading series. Keep an eye out. Meantime, you can drop me a line at r.villar@gmail.com, note me here, join the Facebook group. Or, leave me a comment or a snide remark. Whatever floats your boat.

And definitely, check the poem....

Rich.



MUCHACHO SELECTS A LOVER

the bottom of the stairs speaks in Spanish
about the kind of woman you must bring
home to mother: softspoken, delicate,
grinding pasteles without question,
yuca prickling beneath fingernails, scraped
knuckles, blood thickening the masa.

jesus is bleeding
above the dinner table on noche buena.
your brother sneaks vodka
into a tumbler full of orange crush.

at the amusement park,
when you crash the blond man's head
off the metal steering wheel in the go cart
in front of you, his testicles shrink
before your apology, because two uncles
have driven him back into the fence. "I'm
sorry, I didn't know the boy was only 16.
I'm sorry, Christ, I'm sorry," he whimpers.

every woman is named maria,
is a salmon escaping the grizzly,
has breasts the size of empty rice pots,
needs a ride home.

you will love her, finally,
when you can picture the spines
of her enemies
in your teeth.