If I read a book and it makes me so cold no fire can ever warm I know that is poetry.

Not long ago, I read a Facebook post that suggested that Shakespeare was a sadist for subjecting us to something as gloomy as King Lear. And I thought of how a doctor's assistant once told me that the only books and films she likes are those that are cheerful and uplifting, because there's enough doom and gloom in the world without looking for more. She said she hardly ever reads fiction, because it’s so depressing. She prefers books on philosophy. "What kind of philosophy?" I asked. She said, "Well, actually I like books that tell you how to be a better person."

"Have you noticed that you don't have any personality?"

Much of the story-line in these works centers around the most influential Anglos of Belken County and their manipulation of the political and economic system to maintain an existing Anglo-Chicano power relationship in which the Anglos have most of the advantages. These clandestine dealings are revealed to the reader through the multiple perspectives of community gossip and an omniscient narrator-manipulator-writer, revealing the social, cultural, and psychological relationships existing between the Anglos and the Chicanos of this community.

Motif.

Diction.

Yeah, but. . . .eighteen? I mean, five or six, or even seven, but eighteen? Conservatively. There are probably many other things we can glean from a first page, but here are eighteen beauties:

We need first pages–and so do novelists. Right from the top, a novel begins working its magic on readers. Perhaps more remarkably, readers also begin working their magic on the novel. The beginning of a novel is, variously, a social contract negotiation, an invitation to a dance, a list of rules of the game, and a fairly complex seduction. I know, I know–seduction? Seems extreme, doesn’t it?

If she had any guilt, I imagine the justification my mother probably used that my older brother and I would just ruin our clothes, working with Dad in the sandpit and under the greasy trucks. It made better sense for  the Mimis to be in high fashion than for the feral boys to ruin their clothes. “Mimi, you look just like Jennifer Beals in Flashdance. You should join the dance         team at school.” “I know, Mimi. I think so too.” “Mimi, I think you should dye your hair back to its original color: ‘Ash.’” “I know, Mimi. I’m trying.”“Mimi, is your dog OK? He just spit out another tooth.”

On my first day of school in September 1985, on realizing that I didn't speak a word of English, my fifth-grade teacher pointed to the farthest corner of her classroom and sent me there. She ignored me for the rest of the year. I sat in that corner feeling voiceless, invisible, and deeply ashamed of being a Spanish speaker. The trauma of realizing that the language used in school was the one I didn't know led to debilitating thoughts such as: I am not enough. I am insufficient.

On weekend graveyard shifts at St. Joseph’s Hospital I worked the emergency room, mopping up pools of blood and carting plastic bags stuffed with arms, legs and hands to the outdoor incinerator. I enjoyed the quiet, away from the screams of shotgunned, knifed, and mangled kids writhing on gurneys outside the operating rooms. Ambulance sirens shrieked and squad car lights reddened the cool nights, flashing against the hospital walls: gray—red, gray—red. On slow nights I would lock the door of the administration office, search the reference library for a book on female anatomy and, with my feet propped on the desk, leaf through the illustrations, smoking my cigarette. I was seventeen.

There was once a muchacha who lived near my house. La gente del pueblo talked about her being una de las otras, “of the Others.” They said that for six months she was a woman who had a vagina that bled once a month, and that for the other six months she was a man, had a penis and she peed standing up. They called her half and half, mitá y mitá, neither one nor the other but a strange doubling, a deviation of nature that horrified, a work of nature inverted. But there is a magic aspect in abnormality and so-called deformity. Maimed, mad, and sexually different people were believed to posses supernatural powers by primal cultures’ magico-religious thinking.

There is a rebel in me—the Shadow-Beast. It is a part of me that refuses to take orders from outside authorities. It refuses to take orders from my conscious will, it threatens the sovereignty of my rulership. It is that part of me that hates constraints of any kind, even those self-imposed. At the least hint of limitations on my time or space by others, it kicks out with both feet. Bolts.

You do not speak for the dead.The dead speak for you.

those were the dayswhen ‘Macita would warn me of the cholo neighborsthat dressed and acted like my tíos and when I’d mention this similarity she’d saytus tíos no son cholos they just dress that way

A poet’s devotion, can’t t reach beyond mere walking,         beyond foul words        when the people are stirring into the glowing wind?

But in the end, some will just sit aroundtalking about how good the old world was.Some of the younger ones will become gangsters.Some will die and others will go on livingwithout a soul, a future, or a reason to live.Some will make it out of here with hate in their eyes,but so very few make it out of here as humanas they came in, they leave wondering what good they are nowas they look at their hands so long away from their tools,as they look at themselves, so long gone from their families,so long gone from life itself, so many things have changed.

La mańana         fresca        duerme todavíaLa brisa        corre aprisa         por los surcos Mis pasos        lentos        slowly kiss  the dirt Y me voy         solito         al filo de algodónLas chicharras         en los mesquites         cantan Y segundea        la tortolita        con su coo-coo-cooEl algodón cae        torpe        on pavement ground Y mi espalda         ardeunder hot Azteca sun        reflecting grains of sand        que caen                through tick-tock hour-glass Ayer        mi padre también salío                solito         and crawled a gatas        on burning sands of time                 Algodón piscando         y al sol la cara dando        como si rezando                 a un Dios TodopoderosoAntier         mi abuelito                con su burrito        al mercado fue                con sus jarritos                 y jarrotes        pa’ ganar unos centavitos La pinche vida         Que a tirones la vivimos                 under a never changing sun         nos sigue jodiendo.

where scary stories interspersed with         inherited superstitions were exchanged        waiting for midnight and the haunting,         lament of La Llorona–the weeping lady         of our myths & folklore–who wept nightly        along the banks of Boggy Creek        for the children she’d lost or drowned         in some river (depending on the version).         i think i heard her once        and cried         out of sadness and fear         running all the way home nape hairs at attention         swallow a pinch of table salt and         make the sign of the cross         sure cure for frightened Mexican boys

Not that he isn’t a good man.

“I’ll get a sex change,” Rio says. He gathers the dress up around his hips and clips at his penis with two fingers.        “I like you as a boy,” I tell him.        “Then you’re gay,” he says.        “Don’t you like me?” I ask.        “I love you,” he says. “It’s wrong though. We have to stop or something bad will happen.”        We take off the dresses and hang them in the closet.

You really have to like someone to steal a bike for them.

And Jorge’s dad was good to me and he would take me and Jorge with him to do things and I sometimes felt like he was my dad—only I knew he wasn’t. I was sad sometimes, but not sad, sad, sad. Just sad in a normal way, I think.

His voice was soft, “Come back whenever you want. We’ve been telling your story. Your mother and brother are almost here.”

Memory brought you here. Brought us here. Your history is here. Your family. Your parents and grandparents and great-grandparents. Your siblings and nieces and nephews. When we were in Ithaca, all you could talk about was how much you missed them. How much you missed this land and the endless horizons and the wind and the heat and the sunsets and the rose-colored fog in the morning and the sugar cane burning and the river and driving to South Padre Island and the roasted corn and the shaved ice with syrup and El Pato’s and the botanas and the chorizo from San Manuel and the taquitos de trompo served with frijoles a la charra and baked potatoes and the cabrito al carbon on the other side of the border. You missed everything, even the scent of the air and the heat of the nights and the feel of the earth. To you, the Rio Grande Valley wasn’t simply a place on a map—the name itself was an incantation. Earth and sun and magic all at once.

Her rosary she prays and fingersendlesslylike the family working down a row of beets                to turn around                and work                and work.        There is no end. Her eyes a mirror of all the warmth                and all the love for me,and I am herand she is me.

My knees are caked with mud.My hands calloused from the hoe.I have made the Anglo rich,yet Equality is but a word–the Treaty of Hidalgo has been brokenand is but another treacherous promise.My land is lostand stolen,My culture has been raped.I lengthenthe line at the welfare doorand fill the jails with crime. These thenare the rewardsthis society hasfor the sons of chiefsand kingsand bloody revolutionists,who gave a foreign peopleall their skills and ingenuityto pave the way with brains and blood for those hordes of gold-starvedstrangers, who changed our language and plagiarized our deedsas feats of valorof their own

I must choose                betweenthe paradox ofvictory of the spirit,despite physical hunger,                orto exist in the graspof American social neurosis,sterilization of the souland a full stomach.