Many of the poems of Connecticut poet José B. González deal with isolation.
“Everywhere I look, I see this isolation come into play. From the child who is alone at the border to the soldier who is abroad fighting in a war, we are all affected by the sacrifice and pain of isolation,” says González.
He sees poetry as a form of healing and of advocacy and believes that poetry is like breath: a natural part of life and life-saving in its purpose.
“I meet people of all ages who turned away from poetry at some point, as if they were traumatized by a couplet. I encourage all to give poetry readings and reading and writing poetry a chance.”
Gonzalez is the author of the International Latino Book Award Finalist “Toys Made of Rock” as well as “When Love Was Reels.” His poetry has been anthologized in the Norton “Inroduction to Literature,” as well as in “Theatre Under My Skin: Contemporary Salvadoran Poetry and Wandering Song: Central American Writing in the United States.” He is the co-editor (with John S. Christie) of “Latino Boom: An Anthology of U.S. Latino Literature.”
González has been a contributor to National Public Radio and has been a featured presenter at colleges and universities throughout the U.S. He has also presented at the Smithsonian Museum of African Art and the Smithsonian Museum of the American Indian. A Fulbright Scholar, he is the editor and founder of latinostories.com.
González is a professor of English at the U.S. Coast Guard Academy in New London. He lives in Quaker Hill.
— Ginny Lowe Connors, former poet laureate of West Hartford
toys made of rock
long before i got hurt playing with my
first english word, i used rocks as toys
and juggled juggled them back
and forth, even the jagged ones
that carved into my palms felt
like cotton comforting my
calluses, and even when i missed
& they c-r-a-c-k-e-d into millions
of pieces i’d still feel like
they belonged to me, like
they were natural parts
of my un-bro-ken spa-nish life.
signs of el salvador
Traffic signs in front of Buelita’s house
once stood like soldiers,
firing warnings to yield, stop,
and beware of pedestrians.
That was before the war
made them into cryptograms,
shot
after
shot,
bomb
after
bomb,
erasing
letters,
that once shouted orders.
All that’s left
are signs
with whispered
warnings.
To Papi
& at 6
no alphabets or crayons
to spell letters & draw
curls; you joined your mother& started selling soap
on streets stained with sweat.
jabon, jabon,
you’d call out into the ears
of passersby who’d smell the lye
& miss the bleached spots
on your arms,
&
while your friends’ fingers
made marbles click & clack,
you would use yours to count
pesos & give change back.
& now that i am 6, the son
that you own, & you have
left to the u.s.a. alone,
i wait for a guava tree to
drop a letter saying u have
enough dollars for mami,
yani and me to join you.
until that day,
i will kick the earth’s puddles,
scrub away el salvador’s spare soil,
rinse myself with drops of mud,
& curse the distance between dirt,
clean water & our blood.
mami’s days
she sews to sew sleeves all day,
adding arms to shirts,
& leaves in the morning
before the first chocolate melts, returns
with stretched arms that hang
as if they’ve been pulled by their joints,
& even when it seems that the rest
of her body will not catch up to her will,
she still sews to sew so that
in the end we can join papi in the u.s.
& be whole again.
I
he asked
where you were born.
you used to say:
in a place where food was a finger pointing north
& desperation was a sticklike hand that rubbed a wife’s 9 full-moon belly,
a place where the clayed skin of houses scabbed into a thirsty river
& roofs caved in like hands cupping aged water.
you once asked me
if the school fights made me wish we had stayed
near coffee bean fields.
& even then I should have said that life is not about kicking
outside a womb, but that it’s about eyes catching light.
II
he asked
if you belonged to clubs or organizations.
you used to say
that a knock on a door is a knee on the ground
& that when lava tumbles over a neighbor’s home,
it’s only a matter of time before it seeps under our beds,
& so you wouldn’t turn crawling fingers away.
you once asked me
if I minded the long lines at home
the bathroom waits, the phone ringing for who,
& the cars honking their horns.
& even then I should have said that I knew that you
would not let the air I breathed be painted
the color of someone else’s smoke.
III
he asked
if we wanted to ask for donations in lieu of flowers.
you used to say
that the flowers on the edges of city’s sidewalks
were from your first job off the plane
& that each time the flowers resurrected
they remembered their first language.
you once asked me
if I was embarrassed by the earth in your fingernails.
& even then I should have said that your outstretched palms
blocked my view of what was on the other side.
IV
the morning of the obituary
I should have said,
they should have read,
you, father, may not have lived the answer
but in your story,
beginning,
middle,
end,
were crumbs of bread that left a trail
of where you gave & where you bled.
No pure Caribbean tree grows
In my New England backyard
Full of hickories with Puritan bark.
Capes grow here, sowing
Colonials and Frost fences
In Yankee farms never visited
By palms of the tropics,
But subdivided by apples
And Thanksgiving veggies.
Museums of whales,
Watered by fountains
Of Gloucester watches,
Meet museums of witches,
Filled with trials
Of Salem wizards,
But no museums or wintry greenhouses
Hold Caribbean frescoes.
Still lives of mangoes and guavas,
Uneaten,
Unrecognized,
Unsold,
Sit at farmers’ markets,
Grown by hungry and nostalgic curators.
Poems copyright Jose B. Gonzalez, These poems were published previously in “Toys Made of Rock,” Bilingual Press. Work for CT Poets Corner —a monthly feature highlighting the poetry of Connecticut authors — is selected by invitation.
