For lost objects and lost money, go without. For loss of vigor for life, begin the rite at once by setting down on paper the patient's full name and date of birth. Second, obtain a small statue of the saint. Wrap all contents in cloth, secure with string, and toss the bundle into the river. Look for winged signs over the coming days when awake and when dreaming. They will appear if your offering stays intact for nine full days.
from the bookSUSTO / Center for Literary Publishing Colorado State University
This lyric extolls mystical warnings much like those that laced my childhood. “Mother” here refers both to bloodmother and to the Earth. "Remedio: San Antonio" is one of many remedies that work as cairns throughout "Susto" (Spanish for mystical fright). Said remedies work also to celebrate the Latinx healing art that is curanderismo. I grew up hunting for roots and plants with medicinal powers with my mother and maternal grandfather.
This April, to celebrate National Poetry Month, we'll share popular writing prompts from our What Sparks Poetry series, starting tomorrow. Write along with us!
"I’ve written extensively about my impatience with folks treating poetic fragment as if it were new. What I think my version of it brings is a merging of lyric intimacy, spiritual intuition, natural and constructed surfaces, especially in a time of ecological peril. Another thought is that people treat poetic interruptions as if they were an exception, but, in fact, most people think most of the time in partial sentences, and poets like Niedecker or Guest learn to polish the fragment."
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"From my seat alongside Rattlesnake Creek, I looked upstream toward the high-elevation wilderness snowfields that framed and fed the floodplain. The water at my feet had once resided there, and before that it existed as moisture trapped inside a cloud, and perhaps before that as fog, the slough’s breath, the valley’s exhalation, ad infinitum."
