Each month, the San Francisco Public Library Web site, www.sfpl.org, will feature selected poems reflecting the theme of War and Peace on Our Streets.
To submit a poem or for more information about the project, see our News Release.
San Francisco Chronicle
September Featured Poet:
Alejandro Murguía
Alejandro Murguía is a two-time winner of the American Book Award, most recently for THIS WAR CALLED LOVE, City Lights Books.
His memoir THE MEDICINE OF MEMORY: A MEXICA CLAN IN CALIFORNIA has been nominated for the Victor Turner Prize in Ethnographic Writing. A new edition of SPARE POEMS will be published later this year.
He was born in California and raised in Mexico City, During the 70s he was editor of Tin-Tan Magazine, the first Chicano-Latino arts and literature magazine. He was a founding member and the first director
of the Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts in San Francisco, and is an editor, tranlator, and teacher of Latin American literature at SF State. He won the a American Book Award for Southern Front, 1991.
16th & Valencia.
by Alejandro Murguía
I saw Jack Micheline on the corner of 16th & Valencia
reciting Skinny Dynamite and he was angry
and the next day he was dead on the last BART train to Concord
and maybe that’s why he was angry
I met Harold Norse shuffling around in a beaten world
his pockets filled with poems only hipsters read
It’s a cesspool out here he sighed
before retreating to the Albion Hotel
where angels honeycomb the walls with dreams
and the rent is paid with angry poems.
I heard Oscar Zeta Acosta brown buffalo footsteps
pounding the Valencia Corridor
shouting poetry at the sick junkies
nodding with their wasted whores
in the lobby of the Hotel Royan “The Mission’s Finest
and even the furniture was angry
I joined the maids at the bus stop
the flower sellers the waiters the norteños trios
the blind guitarist wailing boleros at a purple sky
the shirtless vagrant prophet ranting at a parking meter
the spray paint poetic visionary setting fire to the word
and I knew it was the last call
We were carving our niche in the concrete
We were tired of dying for our own chuck of nothing
Were were tired of surviving from the trash of others
And our eyes flashed with thunder and lightning
And I saw this barrio as a freight train
a crazy Mexican bus careening out of control
a mutiny aboard a battleship
and every porthole filled with anger
And we were going to stay angry
And we were not leaving
Not ever leaving
El corazón del corazón de La Misión
El Camino Real ends here
