William Archila: California Poets Part 8, Four Poems

William Archila

January 8th, 2025

California Poets: Part VIII

William Archila

Four Poems

[I caught a plane exploring the abundance of...]

I caught a plane exploring the abundance of Los Angeles

luminous light where the names of the dead take up

the empty spaces. Something was broken. Something

about nothing. The country told me to go. The dogs bark

to avoid thinking. I cannot escape it. There’s a street of dogs

in El Salvador where it’s impossible to find meaning.

They said corpses were multiplying the empty spaces.

My family advised I stay indoors as much as possible. I was lost.

I was Juned. There was music. That summer heat stuck

to my skin like a sponge. An elder swimming the waters

of a river that I will someday have to cross is another

of God’s disguises. The siblings still had to pay for services.

The reporter says bodies were found in the morgue rotting.

If I close my eyes for a few seconds, I am likely to miss it.

[When I come home & roam the cornhusk...]

When I come home & roam the cornhusk at dusk, my god

crouches on the couch chomping on wood chips & ashes.

I read him facts about tattered ruins & scattered masses

till I’m so ready to thicken the air like a bro who knows

absolutely nothing. When I come home, I tell him there’s

an ash trace of fingers on the walls. A trail of faint smudges

from the fridge to the couch. He piles up the facts to bedevil

my trap. My god, he’s at it again. Out my window, his face

pops up, never lets up. My god, in my ear, his book of curses,

down the chimney howling like a monkey. My god, cast

this outcast out of my house & all the other duendes as well.

Even conquistadors experienced the sublime, carbon-stained

shadow of his body. When they leaned over the cliff, peered

at the river below, hands holding back the dirt in their mouths.

Three Minutes with Mingus                                        

When I read of poets & their lives,

  son of a milkman & seamstress, raised

in a whistle-stop town or village, a child

  who spent his after-school hours deep

in the pages of a library book, I want to go

  back to my childhood, back to the war,

rescue that boy under the bed, listening

  to what bullets can do to a man, take him

out of the homeland, enroll him in school,

  his class-size ten, unfold the fables

of the sea, a Spanish galleon slamming up

  & down the high waters. This is why

I write poems, why I prefer solitude

  when I listen to your lazy sound

of brass on the phonograph. You give

  language to black roosters & fossil bones,

break down phrases between the LA River

  & the yellow taxi cabs of New York.

I picture you in Watts, the 240-pound

  wrath of a bass player building up steam,

woodshedding for the strictly segregated

  hood, those who seek a tiny shot of God,

digging through hard pan, the hammer’s

  grunt & blow. I need a gutbucket of gospel,

the flat land of cotton to catch all those

  Chinese acrobats bubbling inside your head.

When I think of the day I will no longer

  hold a pencil within my hand or glance

upon the spines of my books, I hear

  Picasso’s Guernica in your half-choked

cries, a gray workhorse lost in a fire’s

  spiraling notes, a shrieking tenor sax

for the woman falling out of a burning house.

  I want to tell you if I wrote like you pick

& pat in Blues and Roots, I would understand

  the caravel of my childhood, loose

without oars or sails, rolling on the swells

  of a distant sea. That’s all I got, Mr. Mingus.

I give you the archaeology of my words,

  every painstaking sound I utter when I come

to the end of a line, especially the stressed

  beats of a tiny country I lost long ago.

Guayaberas

In my boyhood, all the men

wore them, a light body shirt

with pleats running down the breast,

two top pockets for pens, notepads,

two bottom ones for keys or loose change,

each sewn with a button

in the middle of the pouch,

a complement tailored to the slit

at the side of the hip. If you look

at photographs in family albums,

men stand against palm trees,

their short-sleeved guayaberas

caught in sunlight, their Panama hats

tipped to the sky. There’s a black and white

of my father, stumbling along fields

of cane, head full of rum,

mouth in an o, probably

singing a bolero of Old San Juan.

On days like these, the sun burned

like an onion in oil. Women hung

guayaberas on windows to dry.

Shirtless, men picked up their barefoot babies

off the floor, held them against their bellies

as if talking to a god. Even my school uniform

was a blue guayabera, but nothing

like my father’s favorite: white,

long-sleeved, above the left breast

a tiny pocket, perfectly slender for a cigar,

arabesque designs vertically stretched.

When the evening breeze lulled

from tree to tree, he serenaded

my mother, guitars and tongues of rum

below her balcony; the trio strumming,

plucking till one in the morning.

I don’t know what came first,

war or years of exile,

but everyone — shakers of maracas, cutters

of cane, rollers of tobacco — stopped wearing them,

hung them back in the closet, waiting

for their children to grow,

an arc of parrots to fly across the sky

at five in the evening. In another country,

fathers in their silver hair sit

on their porches, their sons, now men,

hold babies in the air, guayaberas nicely pressed.

Author Bio:

William Archila is the winner of the 2023 Philip Levine Prize for Poetry for his collection S is For. He is the author of The Art of Exile which was awarded the International Latino Book Award, and The Gravedigger’s Archaeology which received the Letras Latinas/Red Hen Poetry Prize. He was also awarded the 2023 Jack Hazard fellowship. He has been published in Poetry Magazine, The American Poetry Review, AGNl, Copper Nickle, Colorado Review, Kenyon Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Missouri Review, Pleiades, Poetry Northwest, Prairie Schooner, Indiana Review, TriQuarterly and the anthologies The BreakBeat Poets Vol. 4: LatiNext, Latino Poetry The library of America Anthology, and The Wandering Song: Central American Writing in the United States. In 2010, he was named a Debut poet by Poets & Writers. He is a PEN Center USA West Emerging Voices fellow. He is an associate editor of Tía Chucha Press. He lives in Los Angeles, on Tongva land.