María Ochoa
María Ochoa is a writer-photographer. Her most recent work is seen in the photo book Find Peace in a Restless World. Other books of her include Russell City: Images of America; Shout Out: Women of Color Respond to Violence; Creative Collectives: Chicana Painters Working in Community and Enunciating Our Terms: Women of Color in Conflict and Collaboration.
The California State Assembly honored her as Woman of the Year for her contributions to the arts. She was recognized for her creative work with an Alameda County Supervisors Award. The Hayward Historical Society presented her with the John Sandoval Award for outstanding visual documentation of local history.
Ochoa is the recipient of two Ford Foundation fellowships, a Creative Work Fund grant, and residency with the UC Humanities Research Institute. Ochoa earned her doctorate at the University of California Santa Cruz, and is San José State University Professor Emerita Sociology-Interdisciplinary Social Sciences.
Raina J. León
Raina J. León is an Afro-Boricua Philadelphian (currently living on Lisjan Ohlone lands in Berkeley). She is a daughter, sister, madrina, comadre, partner, poet, writer, and teacher educator. She believes in collective action and community work, the profound power of holding space for the telling of our stories, and the liberatory practice of humanizing education.
She seeks out communities of care and craft and is a member of the Carolina African American Writers Collective, Cave Canem, CantoMundo, Macondo, Círculo, The Ruby (SF), and the SF Writers Grotto. She is the author of three collections of poetry, Canticle of Idols , Boogeyman Dawn and sombra: dis(locate) and the chapbooks, profeta without refuge and Areyto to Atabey: Essays on the Mother(ing) Self. She has received fellowships and residencies with the SV Community of Writers, Montana Artists Refuge, the Macdowell Colony, Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, Vermont Studio Center, the Tyrone Guthrie Center in Annamaghkerrig, Ireland and Ragdale.
She is a founding editor of The Acentos Review, an online quarterly, international journal devoted to the promotion and publication of Latinx arts. She is also the poetry editor for Raising Mothers (raisingmothers.com). She is a full professor of education at Saint Mary’s College of California, only the third Black person (all of us Black women) and the first Afro-Latina to achieve that rank there.
Scenes in the life of a lesser angel
I borrow wings from other angels, coast
the streets to find feathers loosely attached
to slender silver ties. With care, I close the catch
and fasten cardboard stiffened form so close
I cannot breathe or fly for the air
pushed out into a world in masquerade.
I am African. I am goddess with flare
sounding the trumpets. I call out God.
Meaning changes like sea water in storm.
I part the crowds until, beaten, my wings
fly, fall, litter the streets. I cradle the newborn
twins and realize that I am fallen,
a lesser angel, wingless and depressed.
I am seductress unpetaled, undressed.
II.
dress her navel in lotus flowers
to swim in the pool of her abdomen
twine orange blossoms in her hair
and smell the scent of oils and natural perfume
kiss her nipples so that they become pyramids
wet from a summer rain of tongue
press her down into soft linens with hard
body folding into hers like tributary waters
warm her hands against heated chest
that covers drum rhythms resounding
men, worship your women this way
women, flush at the adoration
and you will know how I feel
when he touches my hand
Raina J. León, "Scenes in the life of a lesser angel" from Canticle of Idols. Copyright © 2008 by Raina J. León.
Elizabeth Marino
Chicago poet Elizabeth Marino has seen her work travel. Her poems and essays have appeared in little magazines, litzines, blogs and print anthologies in India, Gambia, England, Scotland, San Francisco, Austin, Cleveland and Chicago, including two Vagabond collections (Rise and EXTREME), as well as the new full-length ASYLUM (poems and memoir). Her work also appears in four Revolutionary Poetry Brigade anthologies. Prior releases include two chapbooks, Debris (Puddin'head Press, 2011) and Ceremonies (dancing girl press 2016). She was awarded a Ragdale residency, a Hispanic Serving Institution grant, and a CAAP grant. She holds an MA in English from University of Illinois at Chicago's Writers Program and a BA in English and Humanities from Barat College, in addition to coursework at the University of Oxford. She earned her living teaching writing and literature at local universities for years, as well as had a popular SAGE workshop.
ASYLUM
Another sleepless night,
and my remote
takes me to Charlie and his
blue plastic boat, shared at
St. Vincent Orphan Asylum
in Chicago. His hair was wondrously
full, and he made my belly laugh
as we waited and drifted.
The dormitory cribs were
far different from the blue vinyl
mats on the concrete floor
of the women’s wing of the
shelter. Each places of shelter
and transit, an end time
at any time.
And I see these pictures
of the children stacked up like
cordwood, relatively safe
in their Texas detention camps,
compared to the Pakistani children
stacked up like cordwood
in ox carts, after a drone attack.
It is difficult to shut off
these images on the screen
of the mind’s eye. The browser sticks,
and keeps refreshing itself.
In the morning
I must go out the door
and decide to be alive.
Carla Schick
Carla Schick is a Queer transformative justice activist and writer. Born in New York, and living in the Bay Area, their writing attempts to weave together personal stories, politics, history, and resistance & liberation. They have been published in Milvia St., Forum Literary Journal, Sinister Wisdom, Berkeley Times, California Quarterly and Earth’s Daughters. Their work also appears online at A Gathering of the Tribes and The Write Launch. They won first place in the Barbara Mandigo Kelly Peace Poetry Prize (2012, 2018). They are currently completing work at Berkeley City College to receive their Certificate in Poetry (Creative Writing).
Excerpt from "Dear Young Queer Non-Binary Poet"
Older than you, I wandered wide, but infinitely narrow, New York, Queens streets in search of my body. Yes, my body. I sat in the drip drip drip of basement pipes with my best girlfriend as we promised to grow up together. This didn’t happen. I grew up. Left. She shattered under the weight of her father’s history of mental depression.
I grew up and have the scars to prove it: shin dented and scraped, and a cut over my eye where J. ran into my head with her teeth as I went to tag her out in running bases. I still can awkwardly bend the finger that my dad splinted saying everything would be okay; so I went bowling. The body I tore at and wore out. The knee whose cartilage collapsed so I could pretend I couldn’t do PE anymore. The body I learned how to disappear under too big clothes and lunches thrown out.
To continue reading go to https://thewritelaunch.com/2020/07/dear-young-queer-non-binary-poet/
