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“100 Things” on My Mind

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By Ernie McCray

I just finished a very pleasant read, “100 Things Arizona Fans Should Know and Do Before They Die,” a book written by two of the best sports writers around, Steve Rivera and Anthony Gimino.

They write a lot about Arizona Basketball History and having played a role in that history, and having been around it all my life, the book couldn’t help but resonate with me in special ways.

In a chapter about University of Arizona traditions I found the words to a fight song that’s flowed through my veins and bones ever since I first heard it as a 14 year old, back in 1952:

Bear Down, Arizona
Bear Down, Red and Blue
Bear Down, Arizona
Hit ’em hard, let ’em know who’s who
Bear Down, Arizona
Bear Down, Red and Blue
Go, go Wildcats, go
Arizona Bear Down

  [Read more…]

My California Drought

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By Will Falk

there’s water, at least,
on the coast
and that’s where I’m heading

when stopped near
Petaluma, California
a sunburnt sign
hangs over a vineyard
celebrating a family
insurance business’s
longevity   [Read more…]

Playwright Paul S. Flores’ PLACAS: The Most Dangerous Tattoo is Coming to San Diego

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Part Two of a Two Part Interview with the Former Chula Vistan and UCSD Student

By Brent E. Beltrán

For Part I of the interview please visit.

In this second installment of my two part interview with playwright Paul S. Flores he discusses the founding of Los Delicados, what poetry means to him, his novel Along The Border Lies, what attracted him to theatre, his play PLACAS: The Most Dangerous Tattoo, the casting of Culture Clash’s Ric Salinas in the lead role, the outreach for the play, him being named a Doris Duke Artist, and what advice he’d give to fledgling minority writers.   [Read more…]

Geo-Poetic Spaces: Mission Beach

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By Ishmael von Heidrick-Barnes

Mission Beach

The boardwalk
wakes to surfers
slipping out of morning swells
window washers
wiping away coastal haze

In Belmont Park
workers inspect
the 90-year-old Dipper

Laminated waves of wood   [Read more…]

Playwright Paul S. Flores Brings PLACAS to San Diego

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Part One of a Two Part Interview with the Former Chula Vistan and UCSD Student

By Brent E. Beltrán

Writer Paul S. Flores grew up in Chula Vista and attended UCSD. He moved to San Francisco to pursue his Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing. While there he immersed himself in the Bay Area arts/activist scene, helped found Youth Speaks, co-founded the irreverent poetry troupe Los Delicados, wrote an award winning novel, Along The Border Lies, wrote and performed his original plays, had children, and was recently named a Doris Duke Artist. His play PLACAS: The Most Dangerous Tattoo is touring California with a stop in San Diego April 23-25.

I met Paul, along with his Delicado compatriots, at a Floricanto Festival in San Jose in 1999 while publisher of the grassroots literary publishing house Calaca Press. In 2000, Calaca Press produced the spoken word CD anthology, Raza Spoken Here 2, which featured their poem Presente! In 2001 Calaca released their full length CD, Word Descarga. Since then Paul has gone on to do some tremendous literary work.   [Read more…]

A Video Interview With and Poetry by Amiri Baraka

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By SDFP Staff

The following video conducted in 1998 by poet E. Ethelbert Miller of HoCoPoLitSo’s The Writing Life features an interview with, and poetry by, the late, great, radical poet Amiri Baraka (formerly known as Leroi Jones).

His website states:
“[D]ramatist, novelist and poet, Amiri Baraka is one of the most respected and widely published African-American writers. With the beginning of Black Civil Rights Movements during the sixties, Baraka explored the anger of African-Americans and used his writings as a weapon against racism. Also, he advocated scientific socialism with his revolutionary inclined poems and aimed at creating aesthetic through them.   [Read more…]

Puerto Rican Obituary

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By Pedro Pietri

Pedro Pietri, El Reverendo de la Iglesia de la Madre de los Tomates and the Spanglish Metaphor Consultant of the Latin Insomniacs Motorcycle Club Without Motorcycles, was born in Puerto Rico in 1944 and grew up in Harlem. He first read Puerto Rican Obituary in 1969 at a Young Lords Party rally in New York. In 1973 Monthly Review Press published his first collection of poetry, Puerto Rican Obituary. He, along with Miguel Algarín, Miguel Piñero, Victor Hernandez Cruz and many others were an integral part of the Nuyorican Poetry Movement. On March 2, 2004 he died of cancer mid-flight on his way back to New York after spending time at an experimental cancer treatment facility in Tijuana, Mexico. While in Tijuana he was cared for by his brother Joe Pietri, longtime friend, poet, and former San Diego resident Jesus “Papoleto” Melendez, and the folks at Calaca Press including future San Diego Free Press writer and Editorial Board member Brent E. Beltrán.    [Read more…]

Eduardo Galeano, Sacrilegious Women

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Eduardo Galeano / Tom Dispatch

Editor Note: Acclaimed author and champion of social justice Eduardo Galeano died on April 13, 2015.

His book Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent came out in 1971 and proved to be the first vampire thriller of our American imperial age. Its blood-sucker of a plot was too outrageous not to be mesmerizing: a country called the United States declares a “good neighbor” policy for those living in its hemisphere because they just look so tasty, and then proceeds to suck the economic blood out of country after country. Hollywood never topped it. “True Blood” and “The Vampire Diaries” couldn’t hold an incisor to it; Buffy was a punk by comparison.   [Read more…]

This is for…

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By Brent E. Beltrán

This is for those that came before
The ones that paved the way
Blazed the trail
And beat the path

This is for he, she
You, me
Everybody in this neighborhood
         We

This is for the park builders
The pillar painters
Sculpture makers
Cactus garden caretakers   [Read more…]

Far Away

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By Tara Evonne Trudell

crossing
the mojave desert
I dreamed
my people
moving through
heat waves
and hunger pains
mothers fathers
children
willing life
dying to cross
a line
drawn in sand
drones hovering in air
dangerous spy tactics
always monitoring
the calculation
in military moves   [Read more…]

Geo-Poetic Spaces: My Uncle’s Cigar

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By Ishmael von Heidrick-Barnes

Cigar smoke
blows my Uncle’s Cessna
over the Andes
home
where he strikes a match
lights another Habana

Hand rolled tobacco leaves
crackling
into an amiable glow:   [Read more…]

An Inconvenient Companion: For Mary Kowit

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By Jim Moreno

Grief is an inconvenient companion,
In the grocery store line, in the middle of a sentence,
Hanging clothes on the line, it doesn’t care,

It grabs you by your lapels, It grabs you by your throat,
It low blows your gut, It shakes you and shakes you,
Fills your eyes with rain, then suddenly,
It lets you go. Just like that―gone.

It doesn’t care where it flows,
It must gush & flow; return later when you
Least expect it and shake you and shake you again.   [Read more…]

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