Wednesday, July 9, 2014

7/14/14 Nancy Gonzalez Featured at Poetry Express




7/14/14 Nancy Gonzalez


Nancy Aidé González is a Chicana poet and educator. She graduated from California State
University, Sacramento with a Bachelor of Arts degree in English Literature. She attended Las Dos Brujas Writer’s Workshop in 2012. Her work has appeared in Mujeres De Maiz Zine, Huizache The magazine of Latino literature, DoveTales, Tule Review, Seeds of Resistance Flor y Canto:Tortilla Warrior, La Bloga, and several other literary journals. Her work is featured in the Sacramento Voices: Foam at the Mouth Anthology (2013). She is a participating member of Escritores del Nuevo Sol, a writing group based in Sacramento, California which honors the literary traditions of Chicano, Latino, Indigenous and Spanish-language peoples. 

La Virgen de Las Calles
Pink Sentinels
Mujeres Del Maíz
Kites
La Pulga
Tapestry of Dawn
La Virgen de Las Calles

She stands on the
busy street corner
selling delicate red
and white roses
hugged by baby's -breath
and luminous cellophane
resting in a
once discarded
plastic bucket.

She understands the innate
beauty of roses,
their fragility
their fragrant hope
as they grow slowly
from bud to
emerge
embracing change,
as they flush into
full bloom.

She knows of
piercing thorns
and truth,
of crossing
barbed wire
borders.

She understands
the prickling sting,
the aculeus
of being an outsider.

She wears a large
sweatshirt with USA
emblazoned in block
print across her chest
but she misses
Mexico and the
small town she was
raised in .

A red and green
rebozo hangs down
upon her head shielding
her from the flugent sun,
a gift from her mother,
a reminder of home.
People stride past her
lost in their own thoughts
hustling to work,
on pressing errands,
wandering down the tangle
of the Los Angeles
landscape.

She is La Virgen de las Calles,
waiting with a
heavy heart,
full of yearning,
dreaming of
new horizons,
a fountain of
humble tenderness
and abounding love.

La Virgen de las Calles
comprehends the
nature of roses,
their vulnerability
their need for nettle.

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