There is a mountain afraid to lose its place in the landscape.
One of the many lands to give back but I don’t know how.
Inhale comfort into these
contested terrains, extracting answer for a question unimaginable.
I had a dream that José Muñoz showed up wearing
a wine-town plaid sky, a blue windbreaker smiling
like a bulldog, silver-lined and lionized, who waits
alongside the rest of me to see how the light falls
over a tenuous hold of Aztlán so powerful
people thought the page was real.
Is this how you imagine him, I wonder as he tells me,
looking up at Picacho Peak.
You should always be with the people you love the most.
I wake and want to be moved towards the lover who left me
on el camino real, suddenly, a social
evolution, a maturity as offering, a needle falls off a cholla
as an ocotillo passes judgment in this tiny desert town.
Wild these trails where I temper a performative nature,
I move like a 45 record to groove, and slither the erasures
I’m responsible for in these discursive fantasies, needle agendas.
The pages are dog-eared, well-worn and masculine.
It was the year we saw hovering in the distance. It could be the year
we gave the lands back and took our losses like murmurs
stuck in the back of our throats.
RAQUEL GUTIÉRREZ, born and raised in Los Angeles, is a critic, essayist, poet, performer, and educator. Gutiérrez’s first book Brown Neon (Coffee House Press) was named as one of the best books of 2022 by The New Yorker and listed in “The Best Art Books of 2022” by Hyperallergic. Brown Neon was a 2023 Finalist for the Lambda Literary Prize for Best Lesbian Biography/Memoir and 2023 Finalist for the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses’ Firework Award in Creative Nonfiction and Recipient of The Publishing Triangle Judy Grahn Award for Lesbian Nonfiction. A 2021 recipient of the Rabkin Prize in Arts Journalism, as well as a 2017 recipient of the The Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant, Gutiérrez teaches in the Oregon State University-Cascades Low Residency Creative Writing MFA Program, as well as for The Institute of American Indian Arts’s (IAIA) Low Residency MFA in Creative Writing program. Gutiérrez gets to call Tucson, Arizona home. Find Raquel’s work at www.raquelgutierrez.net or follow Raquel at @raquefella on Instagram and Twitter.
CYNTHIA YATCHMAN is a Seattle based artist and art instructor. A former ceramicist, she received her B.F.A. in painting (UW). She switched from 3D to 2D and has remained there ever since. She works primarily on paintings, prints and collages. Her art is housed in numerous public and private collections.
