#thiscityisapoem npm2019

[thiscityisapoem]

National Poetry Month!

It’s our favorite time of the year - National Poetry Month - crammed into 30 amazing days. 

This City Is A Poem is now in our fourth year (Woo Hoo!) and this year we have decided to focus on women and female-identifying poets both in our city and throughout the country. 

We look forward to energizing your writing through our daily prompts. As always, we welcome your responses and may even post them here or our social media.

[thiscityisapoem]

Day 2 : ire’ne lara silva

ire’ne lara silva’s new book, Cuicacalli/House of Song, is out just in time for National Poetry Month. From within its pages we pulled “We Played Survival”. 

We Played Survival

Our game had no other name. Find shelter. The picnic table became the roof of our home. Find food. The long grass with its seed heavy tips became our corn. We stalked the bob white quails. With stealth, with quickness, with hunger in our eyes, we trapped them. We always released them, but the important thing was to catch them. Catching them meant that even in our imagination, hunger lost its sharpness. Build a fire against the winter cold. We gathered kindling. Stacked firewood. We read the sky and the sun.

Listened and heard unknown voices on the wind. Someone had to stand guard. We needed weapons. I don’t remember if we whispered the dangers or only moved as one to do what was needed. They would not burn our home. They would not shoot us. They would not slit our throats. They would not take us alive.

I was seven years old. My brother five. We played in utter silence. No shouting. No laughing. Nothing done carelessly. What did we know of history. What memories lived in our bones.

PROMPT: Change your perspective. If you sit in a chair, sit on the floor. If you stand, lay down. Where does this new perspective take you? What knowledge, deep down inside you, is still present in this new reality?

- - - - - 

ire’ne lara silva is the author of two poetry collections, furia (Mouthfeel Press, 2010) and Blood Sugar Canto (Saddle Road Press, 2016), which were both finalists for the International Latino Book Award in Poetry, an e-chapbook, Enduring Azucares, (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2015), as well as a short story collection, flesh to bone (Aunt Lute Books, 2013) which won the Premio Aztlán. She and poet Dan Vera are also the co-editors of Imaniman: Poets Writing in the Anzaldúan Borderlands, (Aunt Lute Books, 2017), a collection of poetry and essays. ire’ne is the recipient of a 2017 NALAC Fund for the Arts Grant, the final recipient of the Alfredo Cisneros del Moral Award, the Fiction Finalist for AROHO’s 2013 Gift of Freedom Award, and the 2008 recipient of the Gloria Anzaldúa Milagro Award. ire'ne is currently working on her first novel, Naci. Her latest collection of poetry, CUICACALLI/House of Song, will be published by Saddle Road in April 2019. 

irenelarasilva.wordpress.com