Benjamin Garcia
güera they called my mother,
whitest of seven siblings,
though she was never white as snow

or milk—her skin tinged amber
like the Mexican cheese that smelled of feet
that I refused to eat as a child, convinced

the cheese was mixed
by rancher’s bare toes, like grapes
mashed to make some tawny wine

and from brown and cracked soles
acquired its yellow color, inherited
the yellow skin, odorous hard wheel

that did not melt, only crumbled when fresh
or aged would shred upon metallic scales
to soft snow or confetti strands that,

when sprinkled, exhaled a pungent breath
of naked feet that have kissed the earth,
stroked bare cement floors, caressed the skin

of other feet, and from contact grown callused
but beautiful, that if covered must breathe
through open-toed shoes—huaraches, that

was my mother, the güera needing air
and when her flesh was tossed into the melting
pot, she resisted, the strength of callused soles,

hard, ungrated as she tread upon this foreign soil
barefoot, an acquired taste that if you smelled
and did not eat, you could not understand
from the book THROWN IN THE THROAT / MIlkweed Editions
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Text of an Aram Saroyan poem, the centered repetition of the word activity
Aram Saroyan and the One-Word Poem

"I’ve discovered that the best work I can do now is to collect single words that happen to strike me and to type each one out in the center of a page. The one word isn’t “mine” but the one word in the center of the page is....In effect the single word is a new reading process; like electricity—instant and continuous."
 
viaTHE MIT PRESS READER
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Cover of Susan Tichy's book, The Avalanche Path in Summer
What Sparks Poetry:
Susan Tichy on "In Country That Is Rough, But Not Difficult, One Sees Where One Is & Where One Is Going at the Same Time"

"My home mountain range, the Colorado Sangre de Cristo, is an 80-mile fault-block uplift, with ten summits over 14,000 feet....Walking there for the last forty years has helped me learn that place is neither fixed nor purely spatial, but temporary and temporal, contingent and unstable, an intersection of forces I happen to encounter (and take part in) during my brief time on earth and briefer time as walker through a landscape. Here & now is a knot, and all its strands are moving."
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