Writings and Books

This section's articles

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  My Town: A Memoir of Albuquerque, New Mexico in Poems, Prose and Photographs

  Nothing was What it Pretended
  Words I’d never heard took up residence in my mouth. Montaño, even if city signage refused to put the tilda over the n, names like De Vargas, Cabeza de Vaca or Juan Tabó, shepherds and assassins enshrined on street corners unquestioned and mispronounced.
  Indian words like Acoma, Navajo—now Diné— or place names like Canyon de Chelly the conquerors left us with when they couldn’t speak what they couldn’t hear.
  Names imposed: Oñate, Coronado, Santa Fe. Another’s holy (...)
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  ABOUT LITTLE CHARLIE LINDBERGH - poems

  Everyone Lied
  We wanted to make the world a better place but everyone lied, fought power with humble flesh, blood, brilliance, and the luck of the innocent.
  The enemy’s lies assaulted us, their language diminished our numbers, turned us against one another, touched lovers, confused our sense of who we were and why.
  And we lied about them, claimed they were drug dealers and murderers, all their food poisoned, all their streets unsafe. Then we lied about our own, sowed serious doubt, set (...)
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  AS IF THE EMPTY CHAIR / COMO SI LA SILLA VACIA

  Bilingual limited edition of 400 numbered and signed copies. Spanish translations by Leandro Katz and Diego Guerra. Photographs by Annabella Balduvino and Margaret Randall
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  Beneath a Trespass of Sorrow (Poem by Margaret Randall, Maps by Barbara Byers)

  Wings Press, San Antonio, Texas 2014
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  CHE ON MY MIND

  Ernesto Che Guevara occupies a place in our emotional iconography unsurpassed by anyone with the exception of Buddha, Mohammed, Marx, Mary or Jesus of Nazareth. Still contemporary—his death at thirty-nine isn’t yet half a century behind us—he is a figure revered in equal measure by both convinced revolutionaries and apolitical youth at the farthest reaches of our planet. All see in him a symbol of nonconformity and resistance. And, like so many humans we’ve embalmed in myth, scholars and those (...)
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  COMO SI LA SILLA VACIA

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  COMO SI LA SILLA VACIA / AS IF THE EMPTY CHAIR

  Do I Get Out of Bed This Morning?
  Memory moves across a map like the lines in a face spread and deepen, souring testimony to the smile gone, the unheard laughter and cheek offered up for a kiss that will not come.
  Skin fades imperceptibly, its colors hesitate unsure if they will cling to heat or sink to the pale pulse of resignation. Do I get out of bed this morning yet again? Do I wash my face? Do I (...)
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  DAUGHTER OF LADY JAGUAR SHARK

  Daughter of Lady Jaguar Shark
  I am still here, daughter of the great city, Tikal, counter of days, apprentice to scribes grinder of maiz the liquid brown of chocolate on my tongue.
  Daughter of Lady Jaguar Shark, artist, traveler to Copán, Chichén , Palenque, carrier of copper, shells and light.
  Transparent as air and from a place your eyes cannot enter I watch as you wander this time I still call home . . (...)
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  First Laugh: Essays 2000-2009

  Pumping Gas
  Again I am somewhere else. Or everywhere at once. But as always, every word has its color. Sometimes, when I lose one now, the color rises behind my eyes but the word still plays hide and seek. Taunts me from the sidelines. Or a vast rainbow looms, and I must find my way through hues and the language they mask. Sometimes I sit for long minutes sifting through color on my way to word. Word may try to resist, but synapse eventually takes me home. I am seventy-three. My father (...)
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  Haydée Santamaría, Cuban Revolutionary: She Led by Transgression

  II Why Haydée?
  “ . . . the mere mention of Haydée Santamaría signifies a world, an attitude, a sensibility, and also a Revolution, which she did not conceive of as confined to the land of José Martí but to the future of all our peoples. —Mario Benedetti
  Haydée Santamaría was a heroine of the Cuban Revolution, a brilliant, strong but unassuming woman among powerful men. One of only two females among 160 males, she helped organize and fought on the front lines of the 1953 attack on Moncada (...)

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