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25 April 2012

Things in Light Podcast #17: Eclipse Mix

Unknown

The above image was chosen for its humorous value, but the invasion of miller moths currently underway in our neck of the woods is somewhat discomfiting. I've been trying to figure out why the vulnerable seekers of light trapped in my abode and the eclipses of them in the great outdoors! are freaking me out; perhaps the "eek" factor I experience when brushing up against these transformed army cutworms reflects my queasiness about my own insatiable hunger for, well, it. In the process of trying to make peace with these harmless creatures, I made a playlist of moth-themed songs to aid in my meditative endeavor.

Things in Light's seventeenth podcast, Eclipse Mix, features tracks by Faun Fables, Cocteau Twins, Stereolab, Burial + Four Tet, Current 93, Aimee Mann, The Flaming Lips, and They Might Be Giants. See the full track listing below.




1. Faun Fables - Moth
2. Cocteau Twins - When Mama Was Moth
3. Stereolab - Space Moth
4. Burial + Four Tet - Moth
5. Current 93 - Judas as Black Moth
6. Aimee Mann - The Moth
7. The Flaming Lips - Moth in the Incubator
8. They Might Be Giants - Bee of the Bird of the Moth

24 April 2012

Things in Light Podcast #16: Samsara Mix

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Things in Light's sixteenth podcast, Samsara Mix, features recordings by The Grave of Nobody's Darling, Shoulder Voices, The Porter Draw, A Hawk and A Hacksaw, North America, Discotays, Javelina, and Trilobite. See the full track listing below.



1. The Grave of Nobody's Darling - Nine Days and Nights
2. Shoulder Voices - Good Karma
3. The Porter Draw - Davey
4. A Hawk and A Hacksaw - No Rest for the Wicked
5. North America - Hayley's Ghost
6. Discotays - For Liz
7. Javelina - Nicolas
8. Trilobite - Samsara

23 April 2012

Things in Light Podcast #15: Black Forest Mix

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Things in Light's fifteenth podcast, Black Forest Mix, features recordings by Drought, Streights, Harbors, Roñoso, Tenderizor, Leeches of Lore, Great White Buffalo, and Dread. See the full track listing below.




1. Drought - Nightwalker
2. Streights - Glitter Forest/ Cognitive Failure
3. Harbors - Recessive Departure
4. Roñoso - Furry Toes Aflame
5. Tenderizor - Hellucination
6. Leeches of Lore - Macrochelys Temminckii
7. Great White Buffalo - Four
8. Dread - Slay the Kings

17 April 2012

Albuquerque Sonnet 17e

Rudolfo Carrillo


by Rudolfo Carrillo

My blood's made from tragic encounters but also and more lightly so, the salsa from San Felipe's Restaurant. The original, bro, in Coronado Mall, after they closed Wyatt's and the lobby in Vip's Big Boy Became a caricature of itself, which was an empty shell made from plastic and coated lightly in a special grease made from meat juice and cigarette smoke. They had a bronze sculpture of La Entrada right by the main entrance and it had a fake river y todo. All the suffering had been frozen out of the soldier's faces and their horse's skin, first by the heat of an old foundry in Tesuque, then by a relentless sun that beat them senseless and gave the figurines una quietud extraña that we did not expect from conquerers. They had a pipe shop carved Out of ceramic wizards too. It was by Sears, yo, and we used to buy French frajos inside because we knew how much a tarry packet of Galoise impressed las jainas and imagined them whispering Vamos al borlo as that box of squares was tossed awkwardly onto a table at the self-referentially named dormitory dining hall where we did our gambling, after the last Suntran bus had returned from the land of glorious sopapillas, where one might glimpse what the real world must be like: con aire, with tropical plants overflowing here and there, the voices of a million happy humans humming hopefully.

NM Poetry: Ungelbah Daniel-Davila

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We here at Things in Light love poetry. And New Mexico's literary landscape is steeped in the stuff. In celebration of National Poetry Month, TiL will present poetry by members of the exciting and diverse contemporary New Mexico poetry community. The sixth TiL NM Poetry entry provides a three-poem introduction to the work of poet, pin-up model, and photographer Ungelbah Daniel-Davila. She's also a journalist, filmmaker, and the publisher of New Mexico's only free, web-based rockabilly publication, La Loca Magazine.

The Valley

I walk down Coal to 13th,
from the store
where groceries are painted on the wall,
labeled in black –
leche, cigarrillos, jabόn, carne,
toilet paper, coconut hand soap,
a notebook and Saint Lazarus candle in my bag –
recipes for the poor.
Sun on my hair,
in my tattoo,
burning the colors of the barrio –
the woman who sits under a red umbrella
on purple wisteria rooftop,
the neighbor’s blue hydrangeas
lined up against the wall in black pots,
the low cars,
gold, teal, primer gray,
barking South Valley dogs,
and men gathered around an ice cream cart,
bullshitting in Spanish,
turtle doves that croon
mid-day la llarona songs,
guitar music in houses dark from rain clouds,
sticky from afternoon bodies,
my lover’s skin
salty from working hard today,
his sweat burning sweet booze,
gleaning a breeze off the river,
drinkin’ lonely.
I thumb a necklace of keys to get inside his door.


The Boys of Burque

Cockgrease, Layrite, Morgans and Sweet Georgia Brown
boys, in broken down Fords,
in drive-through lines, and dirt lots
genuflecting beneath winged Cadillacs and Biscaynes,
nuclear green, Communist red, rattle-can black, back down,
top up, East past Rio Grande,
past motel row, past neon, past go,
toward broken bottled burro alleyways,
toward ephemeral dawns crashing through windshields
drunk on whiskey, Pabst, tequila sunrises,
singing Hank, singing Cline, singing
that blackbird lullaby, that love me tender
moment of a setting moon.


Odessa

I taste your name, sliding along my tongue
and teeth like an unfurling copperhead
at sunset a rig drills beyond your rosy neon lights,
panhandle black against an orange Texas sky, setting
and rising a slow, oily waltz.
Your men drift in off the field, Odessa,
their blue norther bodies
humming honkey tonk hymns, nails
workingman dark in the dashboard glow of an FM station.
Suck the smoke from their mouths, Odessa,
and blow it hard and slow so it rises
far above the barroom haze, settling in a halo
around a sticky jukebox, playing
three generations of Hank against a dirty wall
where I first felt you arch your aching back against me,
your whiskey breath sweet as rotten fruit.

———
Ungelbah Daniel-Davila is a poet, writer, journalist, filmmaker, photographer, pinup model and queen of all trades. She has been published in the American Indian Culture and Research Journal, Native People Magazine, and others. She holds a BFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts and her first chapbook, "Effigies II," will be released this year from Salt Publishing, UK. She is the publisher of New Mexico's only free, online rockabilly publication, LaLocaMagazine.com, and the owner of La Loca Linda Pinup-ology. She lives in Albuquerque with her kitten, Lady Marmalade, schnoodle, Oscar the Bandit, and fishie, Ralph the Rocket.

16 April 2012

Things in Light Podcast #14: Flight Pattern Mix

Unknown

Things in Light's fourteenth podcast, Flight Pattern Mix, features recordings by Deadtown Lovers, Pitch & Bark, The Glass Menageries, Javelina, Albuquerque Boys Choir, Luperci, Dripping Rainbow, and Bigawatt. See the full track listing below.



1. Deadtown Lovers - Vertigo
2. Pitch & Bark - Brilliant Armor
3. The Glass Menageries - Down the Well
4. Javelina - In Hiding
5. Albuquerque Boys Choir - Birds for the Sky
6. Luperci - Shine Like Stars in the World
7. Dripping Rainbow - Indian Shakespeare
8. Bigawatt - All My Best Things


11 April 2012

nineteen seventy seven

Rudolfo Carrillo

By Rudolfo Carrillo


When the spring rolled around again and we were still living in Burque, I figured I needed something to do with my time besides mooning over my lost love. She happened to be a mormon girl living on the outskirts of Gallup, New Mexico. I imagined that was a place where flocks of sheep pushed and shuddered through her front yard every morning on their way to galvanized stock tanks brimming over with uranium-laced well water.


But, hell, I knew we'd never go back there and that whatever was going to happen and whoever I was going meet would probably have to do with the new outpost. The new outpost was on the northeast edge of an expansive city and so there ought to be something to do there besides getting sentimental about another place you didn't really like to begin with, I told myself.


I spent some time wandering around the edges of the mountain that was our eastern boundary and became a young master of the desert that preceded it, calling the plants out there by name, making pets of the lizards and tarantulas that I could coax into small plastic boxes, and cataloging the eldritch sounds that emanated from the dark cloak that consumed the mesa and foothills with an acute regularity after the sun had disappeared into the west.


Well, I got bored of the tape recorder but was still fascinated with the rest of the night time - like how the stars shone in a fashion that could be described poetically as a fragile blanket woven of electric corn husks or how the city resembled a busy space station when you looked down upon it from any one of the big rocks that made any entrance into the sandias an exercise humility - and I started sitting in the backyard and listening to a battery-powered radio that my old man brought with us to Albuquerque, instead. It was from his government office and I reckon they let him take it with because it was powered by a type of battery that was no longer manufactured, and besides needed a couple of vacuum tubes to make it work.


It was easy enough to find the tubes. Heck, just about every pharmacy and hardware store in the heights had a tube tester and supply kiosk in the front of the store. So, until the battery wound down, I had a decent radio. It had FM and Shortwave bands, too. I tried out the shortwave dial and just couldn't hang. It was a bunch of folks talking, mostly.


Tuning into the FM range, contrariwise, changed me forever, and I ain't kidding or being unnecessarily hyperbolic about that fact either.


Listen: Before that object came into my possession, I mostly listened to whatever music mis padres favored. Yeah, some of it was a toda madre, too, but having access to such a device in the midst of a springtime when AOR was landing loudly and triumphantly all over the western lands, soaking the airwaves with the heavy sounds and songs whose sublime nature I could only hope to fathom, had an effect similar to what one might experience when opening the door to another universe that is all at once familiar and strange, attractive and repellent, with noise and hair and electric guitars floating around everywhere.


My favorite magically electromagnetic location was located at 92.3 megahertz and was known as KRST. In case you are interested, it's a country station now and has been for at least thirty years. Way back yonder, it was a whole different story. Maybe the evening DJ would start things off with Gong and their flying teapot. Then the dude would segue into some crazy rocanrol by a band called the Modern Lovers. A guy with a bad cough and a Taos accent might just call in to request something by Fleetwood Mac, but when Peter Green was in charge of things.


It went on and on like that through the spring and summer. By July, I had set up a sleeping bag in the grass and spent the late nights and early mornings watching earth rotate against a glorious background of shimmery stars and filling up my head with the grooviest tuneage known to humankind.


And so I forgot all about the girl back in Gallup. Forgot her name and the way her voice sounded just like a nightjar. And didn't remember at all until I started writing this here post, tonight. I think she was called Lisa or some damn thing like that. And after all of that stuff getting stirred around my head and then spilled out onto this page, I feel like totally jamming out to some kind of obscure rocanrol or another and am now inclined to do just that; I guess we will have to chat more about this local music and radio stuff next time. 


Be seeing you.


NM Poetry: Bonnie Arning

Unknown

We here at Things in Light love poetry. And New Mexico's literary landscape is steeped in the stuff. In celebration of National Poetry Month, TiL will present poetry by members of the exciting and diverse contemporary New Mexico poetry community. The fifth TiL NM Poetry entry provides a two-poem introduction to the work of Albuquerque native and UNM Poetry MFA student Bonnie Arning.

I wrote my estranged husband a love letter,

it was three words scribbled on the back of my palm it was three hundred words
of shorthand scratched out of his favorite .05 width-tip pen it was a series of questions
about the life span of red giants it was manifesto on the seriousness of plate tectonics
I asked about his barber I asked about his mom I told him how much he still loved me
I suspect he might swallow it he might light it on fire take a photograph and make copies
take a megaphone and read it to the neighborhood take a knife and carve it verbatim
into the trunk of our favorite tree he will kiss the places where I let tears blot the ink
where I drew pictures in the margins where I rubbed it against my skin until oil soaked through
I slept for twenty nights with it tucked beneath my pillow I read it aloud until it sounded
like vows I erased the whole paragraph on Vietnamese soup the straw mushrooms
float alone in the broth because you are not here to eat them
and changed the observation
it's possible for a field to have a positive divergence without appearing to diverge at all
and replaced it with
F=F¹i+F²j+F³k because that way only one of us would have to know
the truth I had it dictated to a scribe I had it hummed to a psychic I had a palmist trace
its complicated lines it was composed on the solstice when I was blindfolded by the longest
stretch of night it was placed in the offering bowl at mass it was buried and exhumed
it was folded into a flower then tucked behind my ear. Take it husband it belongs to you,

as you once belonged to me. 


Pearl

Alive! What a shock. Blood sparked
from a single point, then two, then four,
then every bloom on the bush springing
open at once. You
—the brightest bouquet

of cells in my body. Arm bud, leg bud,
heart bulge:
my heart—mansion
one hundred times your size. Congratulations!
Today you have grown an eyelid, today

I have picked out your name. You're a pearl,
sweet as the dark caverns of your circle-pit
eyes. Today I declare love for the C shape
of your spine. O, how I want you alive,

crawling with snails, crusted with barnacles
and tight fisted clams. Wild Pearl of summer—
you will be born to the tides of July. At our first
appointment I expect the doctor to press 

the plastic replica of a fetus into my palm and say:
here is the baby inside you. Instead he hands me
a cup for urine. I go to the bathroom and discover
blood. Doctor why am I bleeding?

I'm sorry but it looks like the fetus has been aborted.
Aborted?
Not Abortion—how much I want you.
Abort program—Abort mission—Mayday! Mayday!
It's Pearl on the radio,
                her jet has been hit,     
she plummets
                          towards the ocean—

Miscarriage: to carry you wrong, to mishandle
your body. Bedridden, I let you soak into the mattress,
crust upon my thighs. Pearl, is this your blood
or my blood? Which of us is wounded?

I am an augur looking for shapes
in the dark stains
—questing for the contours
of your body. I want to outline each one
 in chalk—after all, my daughter has died here.

When the bleeding stops I drink a martini,
I begin to smoke again. Friends call to say:
don't worry, it was a blessing in disguise.
Congratulations! You have dodged the baby-bullet.

On my way to the grocery store something cuts,
cramps, pain and then—a warm lump between
my thighs. Pearl! I want to strap you in a car seat
and drive you to the park. I want to take your picture

and send it to my mother. I need to call the coroner
but what about your death certificate? Won't they
want a birth certificate? I am talking to you as if
your body didn't resemble a chewed hunk of liver.
                                                     Oh my baby,

I bury you in the back yard, like a dead cat, like a dog;
your crumpled stem tucked into the soil. I place a pearl
there as headstone, my marker—because I can't escape
the need to make some proof you were alive.  
———
Bonnie Arning is an Albuquerque native who is currently pursuing her MFA in poetry at UNM. She is the current poetry editor of the Blue Mesa Review and has work that has appeared or is forthcoming in Cream City Review, Gargoyle Magazine, and 2River View.

10 April 2012

NM Poetry: Larry Goodell

Unknown
We here at Things in Light love poetry. And New Mexico's literary landscape is steeped in the stuff. In celebration of National Poetry Month, TiL will present poetry by members of the exciting and diverse contemporary New Mexico poetry community. The fourth TiL NM Poetry entry provides a three-poem introduction to the work of poet, playwright, and performer of "gringo-loco poetics" Larry Goodell. Active in the New Mexico poetry community for 55 years, Goodell is the founder of Duende Press and the Duende Poetry Series in Placitas.


Xipe Totec

It comes in the form of a prayer but not a prayer to,

a prayer from, those Aztec gods so far south again
are offering up prayers for all the victims of their sacrifices
or is that wishful thinking and the imagination rises
to fill in the empty spaces, and oxygen fills the lungs
and going out through the voice box words are formed
so the real and the unreal are married at last
and you have to have flowers, lots of flowers,
when Aztecs are around
thank you coyotl, thank you tomatl, thank you peyotl
thank you tecolote, thank you Nahuatl -- Quetzalcoatl
Huitzilopochtli, Chalchiuhtlicue, Tlaloc and Coatlicue
and Xipe Totec, what do you have to say as you
parade around in the skin of the sacrificed, are you sorry?
"What? I'm long dead are you sorry why don't you
open up your heart for once?"


Love For Love

as my love for love explodes, and sentimentality dies

“he is drowning in the word” Frank O'Hara says
and I am coming alive in the edges of the word
as I make my way through, like swimming for dear life
through letters which say the most common statement of all
adding an I and a you, proving I’m not alone on this earth
as I breathe water and cough up air and a feeling like no other
begins to save me from myself, it is not all lost but gained
found again, resurgence, an in-love feeling in love of again
that word beaten up worn out abused resurrects itself
and throws itself full frame through my body again
and lifts me like the youngest of lovers into the paradise of hope
as the years bang and trash away and the youth spirit of the present
has been there all the time and I didn’t know it till now.


Easter Sunday 2012

someday I’ll be dead in the circle of love
but will they be singing as I sink into oblivion
or feeding like vultures
on the literary remains.

———

Active as a poet in Albuquerque area from 1957 on, Larry Goodell was born in Roswell, New Mexico, learned from University of Southern California in Los Angeles, studied with Robert Creeley in New Mexico, went to the Vancouver Poetry Conference of 1963 to study with Charles Olson, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Duncan, Philip Whalen and Mr Creeley, went to the Berkeley Poetry Conference in 1965, and married photographer/artist Lenore Goodell in 1968.

Goodell founded Duende Press in 1964 and published one poet per issue followed by poetry and art magazines Fervent Valley and Oriental Blue Streak. At the Thunderbird Bar in Placitas, he staged his poetry and fabricated his first event poems. In 1972, he toured the country doing poetry performances with Stephen Rodefer. He organized readings for Downtown Saturday Night, the Rio Grande Writers Association, the Central Torta Series, Albuquerque United Artists, and for many years the Living Batch Bookstore and, more recently, at Silva's Saloon in Bernalillo and the notable Duende Poetry Series in Placitas.




09 April 2012

NM Poetry: Jose Angel Araguz

Unknown


We here at Things in Light love poetry. And New Mexico's literary landscape is steeped in the stuff. In celebration of National Poetry Month, TiL will present poetry by members of the exciting and diverse contemporary New Mexico poetry community. The third TiL NM Poetry entry provides a two-poem introduction to the work of Jose Angel Araguz.

Homecoming

Needles scattered on the carpet
gleam as I turn on the light

and begin sifting through shredded photographs
and pieces of a broken clock;

a thin, white glare catches
then leaves, a sort of lightning

in the silence of my clearing
a path to make my way

past what she has left me,
a mess that radiates like rain

and leaves me wondering:
what fell apart,

what seams ripped,
what tore and let fall

all these sharp lines,
and what part of me starts

when I scan the skin
over my heart.




Extreme Home Makeover (the mother)

Weeks now since the cameras crowed over each step and boom mikes swept up words like crumbs, she still looks over her shoulder for shadows to tell her where to stand. The kids still practice waking up, shifting in their beds, waiting for cues.


Not finding him in the house, she goes out to the garage to find her husband asleep in his truck like he did when their old place was not their place but a hole in the ground.  In the dark, she can only make out half of his face swaying with his slow breathing, each breath bringing to focus what could be ash in his beard. 


———

Jose Angel Araguz hails from Corpus Christi, TX.  His work has appeared in journals such as Hanging Loose, Adobe Walls and Crab Creek Review as well as been featured in Ted Kooser’s American Life in Poetry.  His chapbook, The Wall, is forthcoming from Tiger’s Eye Press.  He presently resides in Albuquerque, NM.

08 April 2012

NM Poetry: Albino Carrillo

Unknown

We here at Things in Light love poetry. And New Mexico's literary landscape is steeped in the stuff. In celebration of National Poetry Month, TiL will present poetry by members of the exciting and diverse contemporary New Mexico poetry community. The second TiL NM Poetry entry provides a two-poem introduction to the work of sixth-generation native New Mexican Albino Carrillo. Carrillo is an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Dayton. New Mexico's history and culture feature prominently in his body of work. And he's TiL Managing Editor Rudolfo Carrillo's twin brother. What better day to feature the work of TiL family than Easter Sunday?

More than what we know

When they strike we’ll never know.  Perhaps in the future
the historians will write that the combat yet to come was like a wild
beast thrashing somewhere in the forest.  Some could hear it.  Some
could see the way the grass and trees were bent to its animal will.
Clinging to the desperate notion their fathers had of a true dream
in which our world was saved by some form of energy or another

way beyond the merely global.  Sure, there are small markers of another
life in the boxes and loins that color your most vivid dreams—
what you take from one place to the next signals you as nomad, willing
to take some beat up guitars, some good ones, a couple of wild
dogs, and the love of your life to live in the woods:  in the future
you hope that the things that held you down don’t expand like some

kind of plastic dream kit that they sell at the mall.  In honor of some
small god from another world, you, you yourself, take the last wild
shot of whiskey and move on.  You’ve heard there’s a war coming, another
shitty episode in the history of the lives and worlds beyond you, the future
jutting out like a piece of living rock upon a mountain, some dreamy
kind of desert prophet atop waiting for, temping lightning.  If you will,

this kind of scene is avoidable.  But its removal from your willing
train of anxiety means accepting what might be an awful truth, wild,
yet plausible:  we as humans are made for war and any kind of future
sense of peace is an illusion.  Al otro mano, I think I know that this thought, another
fault of mine, is also an illusion, masculine and patriarchal in nature.  Some
kind of altered sense makes me hate war, then.  If I see it while dreaming

I’ll let you know, that is my final vision that we were all here, a dream
for some one else to get hold of.  You have to realize that in my lifetime, wild
shit has happened:  the bombings and guns are one thing, another
indication we’d all gone wrong some time before.  When I was young I was willing
to suspend disbelief in the current system long enough to hope for some
love-wrapped action to seal things up.  Now we live in the future

and there is no love in atom bombs or penetrating thermal lasers from the future
that rip though concrete or rock like they were so many layers of some
kind of cake.  For what its worth, there’s a murky moon tonight, willing
and unadorned.  It tells me we’re in for a spell of storms and another
kind of weather.  But at this point, even the sky is laughing, each wild
star laughing.  They are her children, after all, and know all our dreams.

So we read the news every night, hoping the future is like just another
TV show where some of us can see the outcome clearly, willingly.
And if only the show played like a dream, a dream from the wild.



1982-1983

The slow magnet time of our faith was over—the blank desert loomed like an open book,
the bright flowers bloomed, each orange Mallow bud a shock against the dryness
of the earth.  Sometimes Sand Verbena also grew, but you had to look hard along an arroyo’s
twisting bank to find any.  Mostly desert gourds and loco weed grew there in the summer—
I’m not the kind who’d spent too much time in the sun. I preferred darkness,
at night among the stars to see the stories I’d been told unfold in the heavens above

me, the only one in my family who’d stayed up late enough to watch Orion hang above
the Western Plain before drifting into another time zone.  Then there was a summer
that took me away from all that.  I lived in town where we all went to the same school, a dry
state university where the smallest class had 30 students.  In some classes we studied darkness,
but in most we simply memorized history or formulae or names we found in old books
dusty with age, a library dustiness that lingered like smoke above an arroyo

when there’s a brush fire in the hills just east of here.  Of course most arroyos
around here are dry, except for flash flood season.  So you could say the knowledge in books
surged through us like cold summer rain water.  So while I had to linger a while through summer
school, I never forgot the ways in which I knew the ultimate darkness
unfolding around me, how in photographs I could see the shadows much better, dangling above
life,  significant slices of gray against the bright New Mexican day.  It was in the dry

abyss we call the foothills I lost myself, then.  When she first found me I was a dry
gourd waiting to be opened.  Because every night I counted the planets and stars above
me like chandeliers, I didn’t know the human heart and how it can flood like an arroyo
in mid-August when the thick blue clouds race over the eastern mountains, quenching the darkness
and the light.  I must have known her forever in that desert scene, where solitude was a book
to be opened and read as the secret to life.  In this first summer

away from everything I knew, I found nothing had changed except the feeling of summer,
the freedom, I mean.  Whereas before we’d get drunk and stoned out in the desert hills above
a friend’s house, nothing mad or formal would result in our long, discursive talk of books
and future travels to the East or what was easier, the Pacific and Los Angeles.  Of the dry
desert, we’d had enough.  But I don’t think many of us were brave enough to leave the arroyos
of our homeland, the granite hills infested with Lady bugs and snakes that hid in the darkness

like bad karma.  But for those of us not afraid to forever leave the darkness
behind, all I can say is that you enter into another land where there are other shadows and dry
tomes and blackboards that teach nothing, only simulating how life is to be lived beyond and above
the surface of the earth.  Once it gets started in your head, it’s all growth, the easy part of summer
before the heat sets in and the salt cedars stretch deeply their roots past the clay under the arroyos
 to the rich aquifer below.  All I know is I am different for leaving and cannot write a book

because I am now a book of experiences wandering way past the summer
of my undoing.  In the darkness about my dry house I still see stars,
I sit and wait for rain. There are no arroyos here—the rivers rise above flood stage.


———
Albino Carrillo, a sixth generation native New Mexican, received a Master of Fine Arts in Poetry from Arizona State University in 1993, and a Bachelor of Arts in English from the University of New Mexico in 1986. He has published poetry in many literary journals, including The Antioch Review, Puerto Del Sol, Blue Mesa Review, CALIBAN, The South Dakota Review, Columbia: A Journal of Art and Literature, Sou'Wester, and World Order. Carrillo's poems are anthologized in both Library Bound: A Saratoga Anthology (Saratoga Springs Library Press, 1996), and The Wind Shifts: New Latino Poetry (University of Arizona Press, 2007). Carrillo's book of poems is In the City of Smoking Mirrors (University of Arizona Press, 2004). Before teaching at the University of Dayton, Carrillo taught in the English Department at the University of Minnesota, and at Union College of New York, where he held a Post-Doctoral Fellowship. Carrillo is a Pushcart Prize nominee.





05 April 2012

The Remnants of Jumbo and Related Matters

Rudolfo Carrillo

By Rudolfo Carrillo

Órale, carnales! Welcome to post number seventy nine at Things in Light. This week, I've got some very fancy stuff to tell you about regarding the ginchiest state of the union, que se llama New Mexico. I wanted to let you all in on all the groovy polemics, units of discourse, experiences, and wanderings that I thought you'd find at least mildly entertaining as you passed through this site, looking for evidence of a scene; relics from the age of the hegemony of hi-fi; or a translucent indication that cada cabeza really is un mundo. Or a discrete quantum bubble whose precise position can never really be determined. Something to think about, eh? But if you'd rather, I do have what follows.

The Trinity Site is open to public inspection, detection and rejection este Sabado. I think that's a big fracking deal because I'm one of those weird SOBs that uses the first atomic explosion as marker for the advent of postmodernism. Plus which, this year's open house is the day before Pascua, and also falls during the first twenty four hours of Passover. Hmm...add in Oppie's reference to the Bhagvad Gita and dayum! Think about that all you want, but not long enough that you forget to pack your ermines and haul it down the 25 to the San Antonio exit early enough in the day to have lunch at the Buckhorn and then drive out to the site to get a good look around. It takes about two hours each way, I reckon. Definitely essential, travel-wise. The Jornada del Muerto in spring is gorgeous, the relics and monument of the blast profound. Serio.

If you feel like making it an overnight trip, and prefer scientific to mystical overtones, exit in Socorro on the way back, get on NM Highway 60 headed west. Out there, on the plains of San Augustin is the Very Large Array. If you are into deep questions concerning cosmology, the nature of the universe, and dig super badass machinery and technology directed towards unlocking the very secrets of our existence, I highly recommend you take a tour there. I rate the experience as super padre, or chido and a half.

When you're done, get a room in Socorro. It's a friendly place with a world-class engineering school embedded near a mysterious volcano on the west side of the town. For dinner, check out one of the really decent and homestyle restaurantes available, tambien. Just don't ask any of the locals about Lonnie Zamora, sabes...because if we get UFOs involved in the mix now, then this damn post is going to be to hard too follow.

So, just to catch you up, I went down to the Trinity Site once so far, about a year after I met my wife. We drove out there with some crazy hipster friends of hers and my dog, all of us, in my Saturn 4. Y. You know about la perrita, but the other folks you probably don't, excepting Samantha. Anywho, that was round about 2004. We got there at the end of the day, and were among the last group of cars they let into the fenced area surrounding Trinity. There was no wind and there were no clouds that day, with bright blue sky forever and everywhere. We all stood around and smoked cigarettes (except for Rosie, who just sat at the monument and barked at it a couple of times, suspiciously) and thought about what happened on explosion day.

We've got pictures of the trip somewhere among a million other photographs stored here at mi chante, and I couldn't find them tonight. And though my thoughts sometimes turn to the starry possibilities manifest at the VLA, that doesn't seem to matter because the memory of what lies beyond the Stallion Gate on a dusty New Mexico road floats around my head como un espejo fumeroso, just about everyday.

02 April 2012

Things in Light Podcast #13: Walking the Wolf Mix

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Things in Light's thirteenth podcast, Walking the Wolf Mix, features recordings by The Kill Spectors, Bigawatt, Great White Buffalo, Tenderizor, Sabertooth Cavity, Venus Bogardus, The Grave of Nobody's Darling, and The Kleptones. See the full track listing below.




1. The Kill Spectors - Red River St.
2. Bigawatt - Concealer
3. Great White Buffalo - Hallraiser
4. Tenderizor - Rockweiler
5. Sabertooth Cavity - Kief Mountain
6. Venus Bogardus - Quien Es
7. The Grave of Nobody's Darling - Mary
8. The Kleptones - I See Rainbows (for Yoko)

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