Day 21 of Poetry Month: "Movie" by Olga Garcia

Back in the early days of The San Diego Poetry Annual (SDPA), I took my job as a "regional" editor literally: the poems we published should sound like they came from here. Not that I have anything against New York, but the publisher who rejected A River Runs Through It because "this story has trees in it" pointed out a big problem: the editor thought regionalism of the writer shut out the audience, but, in fact, once the University Press of Chicago published the book, The Contemporary West as a region turned out to be a bigger than most Big Apple publishers had been able to see from their center of the world.

To extend the metaphorical ground, The Big Apple is fruit that doesn't always dig the branch it falls from, let alone its roots.

Since I grew up hearing Spanish spoken in my grandparents' house and my own home, I knew Spanish had to be in SDPA.

Influenced by the code-switching of Francisco Bustos, I tried my hand with "La Boca de Tijuana," and as part of the ensemble Drought Buoy, I wrote the lyrics to "Escondereños," both of which I included along with Daniel Charles Thomas' "CORREDOR," Michael Cheno Wickert's "We Were Born" and Olga Garcia's "Movie."

Although Olga also had work in the "Special Bilingual Section," it was her code switching about violence across the border that connected me to the many people I had known who came to the U.S. trying to avoid such violence.

Now more than a decade later, reading about the increase in the number of refugees from Nicaragua, the flight from gang wars in El Salvador and the Ukranians from Bucha, Mariupol and elsewhere needing homes, I feel the pull between foreign languages and empathy. One of the arguments against multilingual poems is that translations in the footnotes break up the flow, but that's only if encountering The Different jolts you to the end of the page. The music of The Different holds me in a moment's mystery:

Movie

whenever i read her poems
she watches me and
I offer her Vallejo and
a Swiss chocolate with almonds
and I say, hi, Emily

today in the news
ten decapitados and my friend
Alfonso gunned down by kidnappers.
he, an architect, could
not build a barrier against them
and as I write this

superimposed on me the Great Wall
along the border
overdosed with mariachi music
and blood
por los siglos de los siglos? (51)

Mentioning the Peruvian poet in the first stanza and using the cognate decapitados in the second stanza sets up the last line of the poem. Whether the reader speaks Spanish or not, the repetition of los siglos musically gives the sense of something multiplying.

And it isn't just the multiplication of violence. "the Great Wall" alludes to the Chinese wonder, which was consructed by several dynasties, none of which it protected. Her title and use of the word "superimposed" suggest that a facile approach to such a serious problem is repetition of a historic mistake.