Rooftop Poetry Club - Rosa Alcala

Rosa Alcalá

Bio:
Currently an Assistant Professor in the Bilingual Creative Writing Department at the University of Texas at El Paso, Rosa Alcalá has published poetry and translations in a variety of literary magazines, including The Kenyon Review, Superflux, Bombay Gin, P-Queue, Chain, Mandorla, and XCP (Cross Cultural Poetics). A selection of her work also appeared in Some Maritime Disasters this Century (Belladonna Books, 2003), and Cinturones de óxido: de Buffalo con amor / Rust Belt Encounters: From Buffalo with Love, translated by Ernesto Livón-Grosman and Omar Pérez (Torre de Letras, La Habana, Cuba, 2005). Her book-length translation of Lourdes Vázquez's Bestiary was published by Bilingual Press in 2003, and her translations of Lila Zemborain's poems have appeared in the St. Mark's Poetry Project Newsletter and ecopoetics. Alcalá has also translated, transcribed from recorded performances, and written on the work of poet and artist Cecilia Vicuńa. Some of her translations of Vicuńa's work include El Templo (Situations Press, 2001), Cloud-net (Art in General, 1999), and the poem-essay "Ubixic del Decir, 'Its Being Said': A Reading of a Reading of the Popol Vuh," published in With Their Hands and Their Eyes: Maya Textiles, Mirrors of a Worldview (Etnografish Museum, Belgium, 2003). She received an MFA in Creative Writing from Brown University, and a PhD in English from the State University of New York at Buffalo.

Poems:

from Tired Parties by Rosa Alcalá
(first published in Superflux, Issue 1)

A girl like me falls in love
with Yeats
and never recovers
from the stretch
of recognition

more twistable now in parts
made suspect by graduation
and further distance
from technical
schools

there are perhaps questions
of sincerity
that leave me weak
at the laptop

soft for those animal shapes
ballooning into pity
or pride

{A guilt of labor raised me
to tart up the phrase, to shove past
the pardon into a belly
alush with the fine dine
of this land.}

Loop 1:

Minnesota men slice
at the chests of pigs
making musicals
with their wrists.

Loop 2:

After a flailing of sense,
your chest contracts to grain
the lung's last
say

Keys strike against
the footage of the past
to defer the weight
of the camera

Asking, who is
the scab of me
when no meatpacking walkout
can suffice?

Documentary: The lyric of unrehearsed chemicals
acts out the tensions of progress
into a brighter but stiller image
called fact or archive

Undocumentary: The man who joined
old world industries of textile
to dirt trucked in from the Ramapos
is not a video
to behold

All those men, acres of previous dye operations. The import of their bodies distributed in lawns all
over Paterson, their products overseas.

(I meant to tell you
the DEP's on top of it,
now that the factory's
gone bust:

The improperly
stored chemicals
"more than 140 55-gallon
drums" (1)
have memorized their plan
in your absence)

There is no retelling the desire to be pulled into a condemned building by a man who will soon live in exile, or the nest of baby swallows in the handicap stall of a public bathroom in Mesilla. You offer it and everyone's a little uncomfortable with this type of architecture. The night we took the train to Newark to eat rabbit there was nothing anyone could do about the rain. We were subject to families greater than nature, yet there it was every time we left New York. From the PATH station to the restaurant, the houses tried to tell you about me, but even now the details distill to a fringe of dented aluminum. So all this roundabout mess of trying to describe a machine that never shuts down, a father standing in two inches of water or sitting on a wooden stool, a racket of heat, is proof of nothing, except the drive of what can't be told, a screen pushing off the pile up of bodies.

(1) American Recycler, February 2004.