#alexandra lytton regalado

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Poetry Connection: El Salvador Edition

Η ποιήτρια Alexandra Lytton Regalado έδωσε μια ανάγνωση και συζήτηση σε στυλ σαλόνι την περασμένη Κυριακή στο Ridley-Tree House, όπου κατοικεί όλη την εβδομάδα, χάρη σε μια συνεργασία με το Santa Barbara City College και το Santa Barbara Museum of Art . Είχα την ευκαιρία να συνδεθώ με τη Regalado όλα αυτά τα χρόνια, πρώτα σε ένα συνέδριο συγγραφής και αργότερα μέσω του Swwim Every Day , ενός…

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About This Path, I Chose It

About This Path, I Chose It

Abstract Blur. Iphone 12 Pro with iColorama app About this path, I chose it. It’s narrow… And these lines force one foot in front of the other. —- Alexandra Lytton Regalado: from poem Relinquenda About This Path, I Chose ItNovember 23, 2022About this path, I chose it. It’s narrow… And these lines force one foot in front of the other. —- Alexandra Lytton Regalado: from poem Relinquenda One…

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Meditative Week of Poetry: Alexandra Lytton Regalado

1. The lineup of snubbed-out butts in the empty cigarette box, hard evidence of how many per day & not what he tells the doctors. Beer bottles tossed in the trash bin; I’ve lost count.

2. “Such constitution,” say the doctors, “You’ve done everything you can to kill your body, & still it won’t quit!” But he’s afraid of the needle. It has to be something so thin & sharp to get into that thick skin. This man who travelled with a gun under the driver’s seat. The zippered bag I remember seeing in his night stand, feeling the burnished leather with a single finger. Does one hand know what the other hand does?

3. He tells a story: “When I was a boy, my friend & I used to go down to the Mississippi River. We spent all day digging in the muddy bank with the idea of building a cave, our clubhouse. The plan was to sleep there, but my friend chickened out in the end & I followed him home. The next day the whole thing had collapsed. Luck or fear kept us alive.”

4. He rubs his hands on his knees as if he’s warming himself up before a long walk. He wanted to play classic guitar, listened to Gitano music & Don Mc Lean’s “American          Pie”—that song crying out its chorus about the devil & the end of the American Dream. The dead musicians flew to North Dakota in bad weather, the song 8 1/2 minutes long, a          hit in 1972, the year I was born, my father’s first, a daughter. “There is no poetry & very little romance in          anything anymore,” said Mc Lean.

5. Moon clouded over, I play my father’s song on the drive home. He’s fallen for the third time in one month, syncope, cut his forehead & broken his arm & somehow managed to drag himself to bed, a soldier to the trench, too drunk to feel pain until he wakes up the next morning & calls out to us saying his body is useless.

6. He’s            unraveling          while I’m still          knitting us,          the cloth pulled &                    snagged,          letting in          light. I undo          my mistakes,          trace                    back to the first stitch.

7. When we speak of you in the third person, you are in the room the way a stone marks an absence.

8. As I pass through the hall, my father is the one I see in every doorway, sitting on the edge of the bed, & when I return to check, he’s gone, like a haze of insects, more air than body.

9. He tells another story: “When I was a boy I used to climb the giant elm in our front yard. Near the top, a branch broke & I fell till I was about one foot above the ground. I hung there in disbelief, suspended by the belt loop of my Levi’s that had caught on a snapped branch.”

10. My mother says he has to be in the ground for these poems to be born.

The tree in our front yard I machete to its milk heart.

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The Wandering Song: Voices of the Central American Diaspora A Literary Performance and Charla 

A recording of our panel at the Latinx Studies Now Conference (July 2018 )in Washington D.C.

Anthology contributors: Alexandra Lytton-Regalado, Francisco Aragón, Quique Avilés. Moderated by anthology co-editor Leticia Hernández-Linares.

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La Cachiporrista by Alexandra Lytton Regalado

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I will have to remember the man’s hooded eyes, as he watches from behind the wire diamonds of chain-link, the whirling wrists of a teenage girl in a majorette skirt fashioned out of half-inch-thick strips of cut newsprint, the fringe swaying with her hips as she twirls a baton of broken broomstick . . .

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—Alexandra Lytton Regalado, from La Cachiporrista

(image from elmcitygardener.com)