from Mixtape for City Kids from Dysfunctional but Happy Families, Kids Like Me
(a new form )
by Roberto Carlos Garcia
When the light from that moon spilled
out of your mother’s belly, I tell you,
you were smiling then. We need a name:
but we can’t call this Menace to the Hood
or Boys in Society or no shit like that. You
have been born into a world. Look around.
See that black boy over there running scared,
his old man got a problem & it’s a bad one. Mami?
Even though she don’t have a job, Mami still
works hard. The last 23 years of her life have been
spent teaching a poet & killing generations
of cockroaches with sky-blue plastic slippers.
But these are the people who will love you
with the same love they received, or hopefully
better. You will have enemies too. My enemies
ride jets to parties. They use words like casualties
to speak of murder. Yes, you’ll survive. Look at me.
I’m shocked too, I’m supposed to be locked up too,
you escape what I escaped you’d be in Paris
getting fucked up too. My father said…surviving
one thing means another comes & kills you.
He’s dead, & so, I trust him. I know this isn’t much.
But I wanted to explain this life to you, even if
I had to become, over the years, someone else to do it.
The miracle of Jesus is himself, not what he said or did
about the future. Forget the future. I’d worship someone
who could do that. Then, slowly, Lo is fo e ri bari
Lo is fo e ri bari love is for everybody Love is for
every every body love love love everybody love.Poet, storyteller, and essayist Roberto Carlos Garcia is a self-described “sancocho […] of provisions from the Harlem Renaissance, the Spanish Poets of 1929, the Black Arts Movement, the Nuyorican School, and the Modernists.” A native New Yorker, Garcia is rigorously interrogative of himself and the world around him, conveying “nakedness of emotion, intent, and experience,” and he writes extensively about the Afro-Latinx and Afro-diasporic experience. Roberto’s third poetry collection, [Elegies], is forthcoming from FlowerSong Press. His second poetry collection, black / Maybe: An Afro Lyric, is available from Willow Books. Roberto’s first collection, Melancolía, is available from Červená Barva Press. His poems and prose have appeared or are forthcoming in POETRY Magazine, The BreakBeat Poets Vol 4: LatiNEXT, Bettering American Poetry Vol. 3, The Root, Those People, Rigorous, Academy of American Poets Poem-A-Day, Gawker, Barrelhouse, The Acentos Review, Lunch Ticket, and many others. He is founder of the cooperative press Get Fresh Books Publishing, A NonProfit Corp. Roberto holds an MFA in Poetry and Poetry in Translation and is the creator of the “mixtape” poem, which resembles a cento in that it is composed of lines borrowed from other poets but also includes lines from fiction, non-fiction, rap lyrics, and other forms of literature. A “mixtape” is between 50 to 100 lines long and should have at least ten original lines written by the poet. The above poem excerpt borrows lines from Reginald Dwaye Betts, Gil Scott Heron, Willie Perdomo, Aracelis Girmay, Jay-Z, John Murillo, Larry Levis, and Rumi.
For Summer: Poems by Latina/o/xs is a curated collaboration between Francisco Aragón at Letras Latinas, the literary initiative at Notre Dame's Institute for Latino Studies, and Emma Trelles at the Best American Poetry blog.
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