Jamail Center for Legal Research
Tarlton Law Library

Public School 190, Brooklyn 1963

The inkwells had no ink.
The flag had 48 stars, four years
after Alaska and Hawaii.
There were vandalized blackboards
and chairs with three legs,
taped windows, retarded boys penned
in the basement.
Some of us stared in Spanish.
We windmilled punches
or hid in the closet to steal from coats
as the teacher drowsed, head bobbing.
We had the Dick and Jane books,
but someone filled in their faces
with a brown crayon.

When Kennedy was shot,
they hurried us onto buses,
not saying why,
saying only that
something bad had happened.
But we knew
something bad had happened,
knew that before
November 22, 1963.

Soliloquy At Gunpoint

I sat in the car,
window down in summer,
waiting. Two boys
from the neighborhood
peered in the car
and did not recognize me,
so one opened his gym bag
and flourished a revolver
with black tape on the handle,
brushing the barrel's tiny mouth
against my forehead.

I sat calm as a burning monk.
The only god in my meditation
was the one who splices the ribbon of film:
a screen full of gunmen with sleepwalker's gaze,
confident detectives in silk neckties,
the cooing of hostage negotiators,
soliloquy at gunpoint
recited without stuttering.

I spread my hand
as if to offer salt
to a licking dog.
The script said, "Give me the gun,"
so I said, "Give me the gun."
And he did.

Offerings To An Ulcerated God

                  -- Chelsea, Massachusetts

"Mrs. Lopez refuses to pay rent,
and we want her out,"
the landlord's lawyer said,
tugging at his law school ring.
The judge called for an interpreter,
but all the interpreters were gone,
trafficking in Spanish
at the criminal session
on the second floor.

A volunteer stood up in the gallery.
Mrs. Lopez showed the interpreter
a poker hand of snapshots,
the rat curled in a glue trap
next to the refrigerator,
the water frozen in the toilet,
a door without a doorknob
(No rent for this. I know the law
and I want to speak,
she whispered to the interpreter).

"Tell her she has to pay
and she has ten days to get out,"
the judge commanded, rose
so the rest of the courtroom rose
and left the bench. Suddenly
the courtroom clattered
with the end of business:

the clerk of the court
gathered her files
and the bailiff went to lunch.
Mrs. Lopez stood before the bench,
still holding up her fan of snapshots
like an offering this ulcerated god
refused to taste,
while the interpreter
felt the burning
bubble in his throat
as he slowly turned to face her.

The Prisoners Of Saint Lawrence

   -- Riverview Correctional Facility,
   Ogdensburg, New York, 1993

The Saint Lawrence River churns white into Canada, races
past barbed walls. Immigrants from a dark sea find oceanic
snow astonishing. Their hammered faces.

harden in city jails and courthouses, indigent cases
telling translators, public defenders what they
remember in Spanish. The island places,

banana leaf and nervous chickens, graces
gone in this amnesia of snow, stinging cocaine
snow, astonishing their hammered faces.

There is snow in the silence of the visiting rooms, spaces
like snow in the paper of their poems and letters, that
remember in Spanish the island places.

So the law speaks of cocaine, grams and traces,
as the prisoners of Saint Lawrence, island men,
snow astonishing their hammered faces,
remember in Spanish the island places.

Sing In The Voice Of A God Even Atheists Can Hear

   -- for Demetria Martinez
   Albuquerque, New Mexico,
   August 1988

So Demetria, accused, stood in the meandering
patient line of all the accused:
accused of ducking searchlights and gunshots
on the border, crossing the river
 to steal televisions from sleeping suburban dens;
accused of mopping in slow lazy rings
or letting meat burn in the spitting grease;

accused of bruising the fruit with bruised hands
picking for so many nickels paid on the bucket;
accused of the bristling knives and needles,
the slash and puncture of the tattooed arm;
accused of leering with an accent
at the cheerleaders of private high schools;
accused of causing ear infections
by jabbering en espanol at the bar,
or pangs in the teeth of those
who mispronounce their names;

accused of skin so brown their brains must shrink
with every promiscuous generation;
accused of kissing the welfare check twice a month
so the man with a pickup truck paying taxes
can never buy a boat;
accused of conquering territory in potter's field,
crowding cemeteries with crosses
like commuters on the subway at rush hour.

But the dead, those dead exhausted
by the drumroll of accusation,
heard the indictment of Demetria.
They knew she walked at the elbow of pariahs,
quietly singing sanctuary. So the dead opened their mouths
and began to sing, not the soprano of choirs glowing white,
but the rough-throated song of people at work
or pause from work in barrios and fields,
the heart-attack seamstress, the lettucepicker in pesticide fog,
the boy who painted murals before the bullet.
In Mexico, her peasant ancestors
sang the corrido of Demetria the Renegade to Zapata's troops.
In El Salvador, the dead with amputated tongues
could suddenly sing, their music floating like steam.
Together they would sing in the voice of a god
even atheists can hear, even a jury across the border.

And the poet was free.

Tires Stacked In The Hallways Of Civilization

   -- Chelsea, Massachusetts

The tenant confessed
in stuttering English:
"Yes, Your Honor,
I am from El Salvador,
and I put my tires
in the hallway."

The judge puffed up
his robes
like a black bird
shaking off rain:
"Tires out of the hallway!
You don't live in a jungle
anymore. This is a civilized country."

So the defendant was ordered
to remove his tires
from the hallways of civilization,
and allowed to keep the cat.

DSS Dream

I dreamed
the Department of Social Services
came to the door and said:
"We understand
you have a baby,
a goat, and a pig living here
in a two-room apartment.
This is illegal.
We have to take the baby away,
unless you eat the goat."

The pig's OK?" I asked.
"The pig's OK," they said.

Martin Espada was born in Brooklyn in 1957 after his parents immigrated to the United States from Puerto Rico. Espada grew up in Brooklyn and became a tenant lawyer, working for six years at Su Clinica Legal, a legal-aid office in Chelsa, Massachusetts, outside Boston. The office also served as a clinical program for the Suffolk University School of Law.
Since 1994, Espada has been a professor in the English Department at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst where he teaches creative writing, Latino poetry, and the work of Pablo Neruda.
Espada's seventh collection of poetry, Alabanza: New and Selected Poems (1982-2002) was published in 2003 by W.W. Norton and Company. An earlier collection of Espada's poetry, Imagine the Angels of Bread (W.W. Norton and Company, 1996), won an American Book Award and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Another collection, Rebellion is the Circle of a Lover's Hands (Curbstone, 1990), won the Paterson Poetry Prize and the PEN/Revson Fellowship. A book of Espada's essays, Zapata's Disciple (South End Press, 1998) received an Independent Publisher Book Award. He is also the editor of Poetry Like Bread: Poets of the Political Imagination (Curbstone Press, 1994)(2000).
Espada's other published collections of poetry include: The Immigrant Iceboy's Bolero (Waterfront Press, 1987); City of Coughing and Dead Radiators: Poems (W.W. Norton and Company, 1993); A Mayan Astronomer in Hell's Kitchen: Poems (W.W. Norton and Company, 2000).
The poems which appear here were drawn from two Espada collections, Imagine the Angels of Bread (W.W. Norton & Company, 1996) and City of Coughing and Dead Radiators: Poems (W.W. Norton & Company, 1993). "Public School 190, Brooklyn 1963" first appeared in Partisan Review; "Soliloquy at Gunpoint" in Crazyhorse; "Offerings to an Ulcerated God" in Ploughshares; "The Prisoners of Saint Lawrence" in Rethinking Marxism; "Sing in the Voice of a God Even Atheists Can Hear" in Bilingual Review.