Voices de la Luna A Quarterly Literature & Arts Magazine 15 August 2017 Volume 9, Number 4 www.voicesdelaluna.org Featured Poet: Erika T. Wurth Featured Interview: Juan Felipe Herrera Poetry by Marian Haddad Fiction by Jasmina Wellinghoff Table of Contents Creative Nonfiction Voices de la Luna, Volume 9, Number 4 Way-Seeking, Nan Cuba 27 Cover Page Art, Ramón Sánchez y Vásquez 3 American Indian and Indigenous People Resources: Editor’s Note, James R. Adair 3 UTSA Special Collections, Agnieszka Czeblakow 28 A Brief History of the Rio Grande Valley International Featured Poet: Erika T. Wurth Poetry Festival, Its Partners, Predecessors, He Brought Me Down 4 Contemporaries, and Posterity, Daniel Garcia Ordaz 31 Receding Like the Wilderness in the Night 4 Fulfillment: Diary of an Amazonian Picker (continued), GOD in the West 5 Paul Juhasz 32 That Small Wooden Box 5 Batting For Lloyd George, Will Rogers 41 Featured Interview: Juan Felipe Herrera Short Fiction Questions for Juan Felipe Herrera, Mo H Saidi 6 Homecoming, Jasmina Wellinghoff 35 Half-Mexican, Juan Felipe Herrera 7 Art/Culture Poetry San Antonio Missions National Historical Park 38 Great Grandmother Refugio, in the Altiplanos of Jalisco by the Volcán del Tequila, Lisa Adela Garcia 8 News & Notes The High Shelf, Lyman Grant 9 Community Outreach Efforts 3 Rose Hill Cemetery: Macon, Georgia, Marian Haddad 10 Quotes from Henry David Thoreau, 1817-1862 26 The Ancient Dance, James Piatt 11 Two San Antonians Named Texas Poets Laureate 39 Summer’s Song, KB Eckhardt 11 Incarcerated LGBTQ Artists Exhibit Their Work 39 Fake Turquoise, Joan Strauch Seifert 12 UTSA Creative Writing Reading Series 39 Suck It: Another Modern Quatrain, Juan Manuel Pérez 12 Nathan: A Love Poem, Harold Rodinsky 13 Reviews Prenatal Lagrimosa, Stephanie Velasquez 13 Book Reviews Dreaming in Noir: Chapter Two Hundred Eighteen, Between Two Gardens (Laura Quinn Guidry), Jim Fernando Esteban Flores 14 LaVilla-Havelin 40 On a Flawless Summer Morning, Betsy Joseph 14 Holy Literary License (Robert Flynn), James R. Adair 40 Purple Field, Seres Jaime Magaña 15 HalfBreed, Ed O’Casey 16 San Antonio Small Presses As thousands of young refugees cross borderlands Wings Press 42 unaccompanied, Emmy Pérez 17 Word Design Studio 42 Crippled by Perception, Emily Garcia Reeves 18 Remember Me, Christopher Carmona 19 Our Sponsors 43 Burial of the Minnisink, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow 20 Ecopoetry: Stone in the Stream/Roca en el Río Back Page Resistance Plantings at Hays Street Bridge People’s Brief Bios of Selected Contributors 44 Park, Kamala Platt 21 Idioma: Those Who Cannot Remember the Past, Chicharras, A/C, Marisol Cortez 21 James R. Adair 44 Therapy Poetry Therapy I Have Anxiety about Anxiety Pills, Melody Mejia 22 The Ways of My Life, Gina Zavala 23 Finally, Cassandra Wood 23 My God or Your God, Roja Sahipour 24 Cries and Whispers, Jessica Kneese 24 My Garden, Sara McKethan 24 A Beggar’s Hands, Sara McKethan 24 My Father, Mary Barba 24 Art Therapy My Freedom—Regeneration, Andrea Vasquez Garcia 25 Untitled, Andrea Vasquez Garcia 25 My Dream, Christina Ysmael 25 Untitled, Christina Ysmael 25 The Head Politics, Frances R. Ford 25 Mixtec king and warlord Eight Deer Jaguar Claw (right) Poetry & Dreams Meeting with Four Jaguar Trennen, Sasha Guzman 26 Codex Zouche-Nuttall The New Jerusalem, James Brandenburg 26 2 Voices de la Luna, 15 August 2017 Cover Page Art Editor’s Note James R. Adair Mission Concepción Acrylic on canvas “Righteous persistence in the face by Ramón Vásquez y Sánchez of difficulty brings reward.” So says the text of hexagram 36 in the I Ching, Ramón Vásquez y the ancient Chinese Book of Changes. Sánchez is an interna- Some changes are good, some are tionally recognized Coa- bad, but almost all big changes in- huiltecan Native Ameri- volve stress of some sort, as hexa- can artist from San gram 36 suggests. Changes are occur- Antonio. Working in ring at Voices de la Luna, some overt watercolor, acrylic, and and some behind the scenes, and we pen and ink, his main fo- hope they are changes that will bene- cus is painting San An- fit the magazine and its readers. First, tonio in the 1800s. Since we have changed the subtitle of the selling his first painting magazine to A Quarterly Literature and Arts Magazine to em- at the age of ten, he has phasize that we promote fiction and creative nonfiction as well as exhibited in California, Wisconsin, Colorado, Texas, Iowa, Mexi- poetry. Second, we have rearranged the contents of the magazine co City, and Madrid. He lives in San Antonio and is a Head Elder and modified the layout, particularly of the pages that contain po- of Aueteca Pagume Coahuiltecan Nation. etry. We believe that the new format, which uses liberal amounts of whitespace, will call attention to our poems in a way that the older format did not. Third, we have two new editors: poetry editor Octavio Quintanilla and prose editor Jasmina Wellinghoff. Quintanilla, who has contributed several poems to Voices over the years, supplies us with several photos that appear throughout the magazine, and Wellinghoff publishes a short story in this, her inaugural issue. I look forward to working with them as we strive together, with the rest of the editorial team and the board, to make Voices de la Luna the premier literary magazine in South Texas and among the best in the state. This issue of Voices focuses on Native Americans and their contributions to American literature, culture, and history. Our cover art was painted by Ramón Vásquez y Sánchez, a local art- Community Outreach Efforts ist and Coahuiltecan leader. Erika Wurth, an Apache/Chickasaw/ Cherokee writer from Colorado, is our featured poet. Nan Cuba In the past quarter, volunteers from Voices de la Luna have led describes her travels to Mayan sites in the Yucatán Peninsula, community outreach efforts at seven different locations, involv- and Agnieszka Czeblakow provides a glimpse into the UTSA ing five volunteers and 373 members of the community. library’s holdings of works related to indigenous and Native American peoples in the Western hemisphere. Other American Visit Voices de la Luna online at www.voicesdelaluna.org for Indian themes also grace our pages, and we even include the additional content and past issues. work of perhaps the most famous Cherokee public figure of the Submission Guidelines early twentieth century, Will Rogers. We are privileged to have an interview with the U.S. Poet Lau- Voices de la Luna is a quarterly publication dedicated to the artistic ex- reate, Juan Felipe Herrera, who discusses the influences on his pression of a wide range of perspectives and topics. In the service of work and his perception of the ways in which poetry can provide a that goal, we welcome diverse, well-written submissions from every way forward in our diverse and fractured world. And speaking of quarter. To submit material for publication in Voices de la Luna, go to voicesdelaluna.submittable.com. poets laureate, Texas has named two more, and both are San An- tonio residents: Jenny Browne (2017) and Carol Coffee Reposa Voices Mission Statement (2018)—read brief bios on each of them on page 39 of this issue. Finally, we feature the contributions of other poets, writers, and Voices de la Luna inspires and promotes poetry and arts and serves as a platform for all poets and artists to share their work with others. It artists who celebrate and lament life and its vicissitudes, com- further uses poetry and arts for both educational and healing purposes menting on the encounters we have, the relationships we build in the community. (and lose), the struggles we face as we attempt to overcome adver- sity, and the lessons we learn from those who have gone before us. At Voices de la Luna, we believe that poetry heals and arts Change is an inevitable part of life. We can either fight against advance the quality of life. it or accept it—and there are times when both are necessary. Whether we acquiesce or resist, the world around us never stands Themes for future issues of Voices de la Luna: still, and it has always been that way. Forward into the ever- November: Science Fiction February: Family Tapestries changing world! Voices de la Luna, 15 August 2017 3 Featured Poet: Erika T. Wurth He Brought Me Down He brought me down on the old grey carpet in the empty room, the smell of smoke and blood everywhere, the girl he didn’t want waiting outside. In that empty room, the darkness complete, my head racing with images of her face, how it mirrored mine with her long dark hair in her long black car, in the middle of the desert, her eyes narrowing into mine, his short dark hands rough but walking in beauty and on the edge, I came to understand what those hands wanted of me. He said he couldn’t help himself his mother a teacher, his father a medicine man, my long yellow body like so many others wrapped around his small one, his skin the darkest cedar. Days later, on that last night under the stars I don’t know if we woke the neighbors, but something dark and dangerous came awake inside me, sliding back into the grass, a blooming of something bright as the blood that had come from my hand that first night, Receding Like the Wilderness in the Night when I’d gone to open the bottle of cheap white wine for the girl he was going to put aside for me only hours Under the stars, the smell of the desert everywhere, L leans later.