Because I am a Square, Old Fuck that Lives on the West Side (of Los Angeles)

It’s easy to get things mixed up. We are, however you paint it, a deciduous rabble of debutantes and derelicts in leather pants. We see parking spaces as barometers of whether businesses will actually have any business existing. We prune our echo chambers of signature interference, deny you the merge of conversation, the comeuppance of a dialogue; we rebuke your lane-change-chit-chat. If you’re on a bicycle in the bicycle lane, we’re aiming for your hind quarters. If you’re on an electric scooter we get to clip you between the hip and knee. If you’re a swarthy kid we reserve the right to never have seen you at all. We barrel down neighborhoods in all of our sedan-class tout suiteness. We Armor-All our sunglasses until they display pixelated avatar drivel. We tantalize our mufflers with ragamuffin megaphone elite gravity. We park like czars so as not to share the municipal parking loam. We block driveways, boulder causeways, break collarbone loading zones. We drive two blocks for milk, but not before lauding each other on the brand of dolphin-safe tuna, ignoring the dinosaur in the room. We pretend people bagging our food were born to bag our food. It’s easy to see sacrifice from the dashboard of my thrive. It’s easy to see how things get done when you’re a pilot ace. It’s easy to bury your feelings in a Frosty or thicker, chocolate shake food. It’s easy to believe the we we assume when you are are you. We assume no responsibility for your nuance, doodad, or eunich. We believe belief is the truest route to Wilshire. We believe bike lanes are fake news. We believe eons ago our ego took a really loud picture. We agree to send you via the route that takes you by the dying airport even though it will be sold slab by slab to scions of loft spaces and self-parking mavens.

LAX2MIA

Read the flyer for registration deets!

LA PALABRA SCHEDULE 2021

SCOPOLAMINE

--para Adolfo Guzman Lopez, truth obstretician y periodista

Papers say the two cops
that shot a non-lethal 40 mm
projectile into the throat
of my friend, a journalist,
acted well within means
and protocols and policy.


Cops say the round bounced
off a pregnant protestor or
belligenrent ectoplasm, so
do over, and chas-chas on the
bottom of their personnel files?


But, what of the duty and
discretion of sworn peace
officers?


If I live under CCTV regime,
why should cops get to decide
when centralized bodycams power
on their Cyclopslog?


Police are not
butlers for abuse, true true;
but, clap on my friends that clap
on star chambers of pedigree and power
and we begin to gots sword-prollems.


Sending out bruisers to enforce
peace is like sending out a tank
because someone stole your changuito.

What of the steering column
of these elite, peace-keepers?


What of the humanists in uniform
that have seen this all before
maybe, in crooked-ass cuneiform?


Quizas, una lecture sobre modales:
When you discharge pepperballs as you retreat
everyone is guilty as shit.

FOREWORD: 8 LA POETS

The first book HINCHAS published was a collection of ghazals for James Foley; I titled the collection "Ghazals for Foley" in honor of Jim's conversion to Islam, but also to highlight the rot, the void left in the world by Jim's graphic murder. This was 2016, almost 18 months after Foley's murder, and most of the ghazals that were published were from former classmates from the UMASS-Amherst Poets & Writers Program. One of the people that didn't go to school with Jim or I, but that submitted ghazals was radio journalist, Adolfo Guzman Lopez. He submitted a ghazal that added leagues to the collection, and solidified our burgeoning friendship.


In 2019, Adolfo invited me to be a part of a ragtag group of poets, writers, and thinkers called Project 1521. The group was called Project 1521 in an attempt to fight the erasure of the 500 years that had passed since Cortes plundered Tenochtitlan. The poets in this group were people like Adolfo and Adrian Arrancibia, two former poets from the Taco Shop Poets, and Linda Ravenswood, the mera mera of the Los Angeles Press, and the bawse behind the Melrose Poetry Bureau and several other literary incubators, and Gloria Enedina Alvarez, the most known unknown poetry matriarch in SoCal. For an interloper like myself (east coast douchebag and such) to be among working-class writers in Los Angeles that are wrestling with art in the pursuit of better rendering their aesthetic has been a major gift.


Linda and I initially geeked out over typewriters, and ended up with the legacy of Miriam Matthews, the first African-American credentialed librarian in California. She plied her trade for the Los Angeles Public Library at a time when she was probably the only person of color in every room all of the time. As a librarian of color in SoCal, I can attest to the peculiar ways in which patrons interact with librarians and vice versa (are YOU the librarian?). Linda and I were going to build an index of libraries that hire performers and build a super femmed out volume so that women of color were not only highlighted, but emphasized. We thought a print edition would be keen since we were going for maximum usability.

And then, the pandemic hit and body slammed our poor, poor mice plans. All of a sudden, all budgest were being contested, especially the print collection budgets of libraries. The demand for online books, services, and materials has literally upended most library systems in the U.S. leading to major library system layoffs in cities like Portland and Kansas City, MO. In other words, it's not that print is dead, but the symbiosis the library world has entertained for the last ten years, between print and online books, just tipped over dramatically into the half destined to be prey. I spoke with Linda and we decided to put the project with the namesake on hold, or at least switch it over to the digital world, and proceed with another project: 8 LA Poets.

Because the future is Female, or at the very least the future is super-less Testosteronny, I decided to publish only women poets in Los Angeles County and to prioritize wonen of color poets. Because Armine and Linda and I are in the same workshop, I have been front and center when they have read original pieces they've crafted on the spot. I have glimpsed their ferocity and basked in their analysis and feel in every sense of the word that they are the real deal. And that's because these bad ass ladies have built their houses from the ground up and never got the motherloving permits and didn't think to ask any government agency for permission. For example, Armine runs her own press and is so ovaries-to-the-wall that she left her steady job as an English teacher to stick her neck out and fight the good fight one word at a time.

Thank you for coming to this book and for drinking a little from its lip. We hope you like the sensory feast Linda has curated for you, and we hope to see you on the inside of this book where space has purposefully been alloted for you, dear reader.