Juan J. Morales was born in the United States to an Ecuadorian mother and a Puerto Rican father. He is the author of three poetry collections, including Friday and the Year That Followed (Fairweather Books, 2006), The Siren World (Fruita, CO: Lithic Press, 2015), and The Handyman's Guide to End Times (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2018). His poetry has appeared in Copper Nickel, Crab Orchard Review, Green Mountains Review, Hayden's Ferry Review, Pank, Pleiades, terrain.org, Zone 3, and others. He is also a CantoMundo Fellow, Editor/Publisher of Pilgrimage Press, and Department Chair of English & World Languages at Colorado State University-Pueblo in Pueblo, Colorado.
Poems
The Siren World
I hear translated calls.
Terms for birds snatch
moths, rivers smother
mountains, skies fused into
mouths like alloys.
My mind’s
to pluck new words from the air
is naïve, but I fight how my tongue
twists in awkward positions
until they naturalize to speak.
The world seduces me to be
the conquistador who strips armor on the beach,
consents to clothes
tattering off his frame,
ghosts into foliage,
and when I open my mouth to speak,
English, Spanish,
Quichua, Quechua,
send me careening into
the smashed rocks of language.
Previously appeared in The Siren World (Lithic Press, 2015)
Fish Hook
I was five when I learned my own blood.
Dad and I fished the lake of cement slabs,
out past yellow grass, our feet jammed in mud.
I pulled the snagged line. Snapped back. The hook stabbed
my thumb, slid past bone, dented the fingernail.
The sun's search for horizon came about
reflecting filament line, a detail
like dad dropping the bucket of caught trout.
Everything halted: the water still cold,
red salmon eggs stuck on our hooks for bait.
He steadied my hand-shaking, uncontrolled.
Father worked the hook. Barbs excavated
through skin ripped. For the tiny hole, I cried,
the blood pools in our hands I could not guide.
Previously appeared in The Siren World (Fruita, CO: Lithic Press, 2015)
Downtown Ambato, 3:14 a.m.
My mother’s hometown,
surrounded by achingly beautiful mountains,
chills me. I am awake thinking about
stories of her childhood swallowed up
by an earthquake and the town
drowning in a celebration
of flowers every year afterward.
I am an apathetic teenager listening to
a strange store alarm
that blares every hour until
the sleepy vendor opens
the metal gate and shuts it off.
The Chinese restaurant’s sign
across the street
shines blue and red, so I count
time between the exhalations
of my mother asleep on the room’s other side.
I wait for stray dogs to bark
on cue, wishing they’d curl up
on a stoop somewhere on the block
and shut up. I turn in the bed every few minutes
and mangle my limbs in sheets
that scratch lullaby
out of my head.
Store alarm again
reverberates off unfinished rooftops
made of cement and rebar,
decorated with potted flowers and
clotheslines full of laundry.
For a moment, with my eyes closed,
I capture every town sound
and convince myself that I understand
my mother’s hunger for sleep after so many years
without. Then I multiply it. I wish I could wake her
and ask how to say insomnia
in Spanish except hope
she’s in the midst of peaceful sleep.
Previously appeared in The Siren World (Fruita, CO: Lithic Press, 2015)
An Apology to La Isla
I implicate myself for neglecting
the island, Puerto Rico, home of my
father, half of my blood, land voiced in dropped
syllable's Andalusian Spanish, isla
I haven't seen in too many years.
I hear hesitation of each coqui's
whistle sent to quell the night, the racket
of bugs bumped against the mosquito nets,
tiny lizards stitched along the house walls.
I've spent too much time away and clung to
my landlocked home state and obsessed over
how las montañas in my mom's Ecuador
dominates the view. I need to smell
empanadilla shacks feeding outlying
towns, try to sleep the humidity's torment,
drown in the hibiscus that color the
lush forests, coax out the island inside.
I will sacrifice a plantain in your
honor and fail to cook a passable
batch of mofongo and wash it down in
liters of cola champagne and accept
that I am a tourist who will ask for
forgiveness only after I return
to PR and say it en español
without tripping on any syllables.
Previously appeared in The Siren World (Lithic Press, 2015)
A Good Education
As a girl in Ecuador, my mother recited saints, prayers, and science formulas.
Our reports in Social Studies did the same when we studied places like Ecuador and commonwealths like Puerto Rico,
served up imports, exports, populations, lags in class with poster board markered and spilled glue.
The world's violence fell from minds like pencils dropped under ancient radiators.
It's all about patriotism learned in a classroom, my mother admiring the Incan King Atahualpa and shaking her head at brother Huáscar.
Lessons widened the divide with Peru, the other country.
Amazing how civil war boils between brothers, flaring up battlegrounds no one can pinpoint.
The blame game helped my mom and her class imagine the disputed zone, el oriente, that divides two countries, that bends young, confused thoughts that clamped inside her, tight fists balled in pride.
And I put myself there too,
getting a good education, oblivious to our country's failings, saying the pledge of allegiance and gawking up at the flag with my small hand on my heart, about which
I knew nothing.
Previously appeared in The Siren World (Lithic Press, 2015)
Gift
*
Take the middle-aged man in an Albuquerque laundromat
who once asked me about my ancestry and boasted
of his 15th generation Spanish heritage held on tracts of land he had
claim to in New Mexico or Spain. I don't remember which.
When I tell him my parents never taught me Spanish, he instructs me
with the condescending click of a tongue to learn.
His tone enough to redden my face like a slap he would have obliged
when I already implicate myself enough in the form
of awkward conjugations and the repeated phrase "¿Cómo se dice .. .?"
Thinking about it now, this man showed me
how we can associate ourselves with one side
and deny the conquered half. I wish I could ask him now
if he knows how we can forgive
the culmination in our struggle through words and idiomas.
*
Bestowed with identical names, the forgotten family are doppelgängers
wearing similar expressions in weathered photos, high cheekbones,
stares of the denied indigena.
I look into their eyes by staring in the mirror and witness
the wounds of younger days I regret collecting.
When I was fourteen and asked if we had Indian blood inside,
my mother's point blank answer, "No." Even then, I didn't believe,
angry she didn't understand why it mattered to recognize
two bloods swirled together while I didn't consider how
concealing the indigena protected her growing up in Ecuador.
To forget the native within, to smother origins in denial,
are adopted habits
from times before I knew how to track a pen into words.
I think about my confusion burying me on a line
drawn in the sand, knowing it will be erased
by the rising tide, and then I turn again
to write future and past pressed together as the skin
we wish to crawl out of, but have to accept as a gift.
Previously appeared in The Siren World (Lithic Press, 2015)
La Ranchera
In the San Luis Valley,
the AM plays a ranchera
where a woman laments losing her lover.
Her ex listens to her pained song
and swallows his jealousy of beer.
My Spanish is not good, but I follow
the strum and horns
that count out her tragedy.
I turn off the radio before it ends
for my hike through the Great Sand Dunes.
When my shoes fill to discomfort,
I empty out the sand. The mountains surround
on all sides of my view. I want to disappear
behind the dunes and peaks,
the desire I had when I was a child
who watched sunsets dragged beyond
Cheyenne Mountain’s blinking radio and TV towers.
Back then, I thought faraway places
stayed blocked by a treacherous climb.
I felt the world bigger than where it ended
with nothing on the other side.
I listen to the AM again, driving home
and thinking of la ranchera.
In my head, she’s longing for someone
to find her as brilliant as the stars again,
in a future without a broken home.
I am captured in the same melody
with nowhere to direct it.
Previously appeared in The Handyman’s Guide to End Times (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2018)
