Author Archives: Oscar Bermeo

Everybody’s Hometown
Originally uploaded by hhsc/Greg

[The best thing I got from this last weekend’s RE:DEFinition Hip-Hop Conference was the feeling that I can come back to hip-hop, my own personal roots, without having to start listening to TI, Chris Brown and Soulja Boy. And so while this may make me tragically unhip to most of the yougins, I can still represent without having to sport saggy jeans cuz you know the saggy look doesn’t let me floss my Fluevogs to the fullest.

This idea of coming back to your old ‘hood has me thinking to a poem from Lorna Dee Cervantes. When you read through this poem, you never do get a sense of arrival. The speaker is really caught between staying and going, as if this place that she once called home is more like a motel room on a business trip with a focus on objects and a memory of warmth where others have stayed and left there mark. In the end, the speaker leaves to where they’re from, an ouroborous like return to the first line of the poem with the caveat that there’s still one last (more?) chance to connect with the past.]

On Touring Her Hometown

I’m going away to where I’m from.
I’m fleeing from visions, fences
grinning from the post. Give me
a hole with a past to it. Fill up
this mess with your wicked engines.
Give me the gun of holidays, calendar
shards, disarray on the avenues
unending as the streets of my vast
memory. There are marigolds six feet
under. They eat the names of the dead.
There are hovels under these caverns
where liquids marry and paint themselves
a mauve display. There’s a place
in the mists of the city where a silence,
lean as ghosts, beckons, is archaic
in the workclothes of my otherness.
There is cedar, ash sage, an owl
on the grave of this town the width
of sin. And crying’s like hating,
it won’t ever pay. I’m going away
to where I’m from. I’m leaving,
last condor, last chance.

© Lorna Dee Cervantes from From the Cables of Genocide: Poems on Love and Hunger

PATERSON, NEW JERSEY 2007 (31)1C
Originally uploaded by ikarus50

[It took me a long time to accept being a Nuyorican writer; it felt like I hadn’t lived a gritty enough city life, thought the poetry I was writing wasn’t political enough, and (the biggest sin) not actually being able to claim coming from la isla. After a while, I started hanging with some other writers who could claim la isla, were writing poetry they felt was deeply political but felt they didn’t have enough of a city experience to feel down since they had grown up in the burbs. Yes, even in community grass roots poetry there are gate keepers who aren’t just measuring your poem when you’re on the mic, but also making sure you hit all the valid culture points and if you don’t… you’re ass out from the club.

One of the first books that clued me in on the fact that any kind of gate keeping, especially coming from inside an ethno group, was completely wrong was The Latin Deli. A mix of poetry and short story that was as Rican as you can get but no so Nuyo with most of the stories going down in Paterson, New Jersey. The irony being that most Latino families I knew in the Bx were plotting day and night to get enough change to be able to buy a house in, you guessed it, New Hersee. So I knew that the Boricua suburb transplant that Judith Ortiz Cofer was writing about was a true Nuyorican voice.

The other burb reality is that you can take the Boricua out of the City but the City always is sure to follow and so the Bodega began to pop up alongside the Italian, Russian and Jewish Delis in the burbs. It’s all so very familiar to me, not just the recognizable food items but the cast of characters that hang by the front counter, some work there, some shop there and others just know that’s the best place to tell a story.]

The Latin Deli: An Ars Poetica

Presiding over a formica counter,
plastic Mother and Child magnetized
to the top of an ancient register,
the heady mix of smells from the open bins
of dried codfish, the green plantains
hanging in stalks like votive offerings,
she is the Patroness of Exiles,
a woman of no-age who was never pretty,
who spends her days selling canned memories
while listening to the Puerto Ricans complain
that it would be cheaper to fly to San Juan
than to buy a pound of Bustelo coffee here,
and to Cubans perfecting their speech
of a “glorious return” to Havana–where no one
has been allowed to die and nothing to change until then;
to Mexicans who pass through, talking lyrically
of dólares to be made in El Norte–
                                                                all wanting the comfort
of spoken Spanish, to gaze upon the family portrait
of her plain wide face, her ample bosom
resting on her plump arms, her look of maternal interest
as they speak to her and each other
of their dreams and their disillusions–
how she smiles understanding,
when they walk down the narrow aisles of her store
reading the labels of packages aloud, as if
they were the names of lost lovers; Suspiros,
Merengues, the stale candy of everyone’s childhood.
                                                                She spends her days
slicing jamón y queso and wrapping it in wax paper
tied with string: plain ham and cheese
that would cost less at the A&P, but it would not satisfy
the hunger of the fragile old man lost in the folds
of his winter coat, who brings her lists of items
that he reads to her like poetry, or the others,
whose needs she must divine, conjuring up products
from places that now exist only in their hearts–
closed ports she must trade with.

© Judith Ortiz Cofer