Willy Palomo
 

  The Zebra Swallowtail evolved alongside the Assemina tree and her fruit, filling her low branches with brilliant black-and-white wings for millennia
Because she looked like a little papaya
to the same conquistadores confundidos

who jumbled up las Indias y las Americas,
now these new pilgrims pendejos call her

paw paw. Call her hillbilly mango,
Hoosier banana, another anchor baby

hailing from somewhere deep in jungle heat.
Imagine tongues hungry for everything

but your name. Imagine being here
for millennia only to be called exotic.

The first white man to write her name
in his journals also hewed her family

down for farmland. He returned
to Europe once he tired of enslaving

centroamericanos with centuries
of indio blood drying on his beard.

Peep this: he only came back to our Americas
angry not enough white people knew

his name. Don’t bother looking him up.

All he wanted was the gold under her
skin. For her yellow to yawn wet between

his fingers. In the chirping dark of summer
moons, before he could draw a single border

on paper, we whispered her thick green name
between our jaws & from our backs, beheld

bold black-&-white wings. We swallowed
& her leaves taught us to shimmy north,

nestled between low branches
for protection
.
We laugh when you call her America’s
best kept secret. Tell me,

¿how does it feel to try to fit
her true name on your tongue?
from the journal THRUSH POETRY
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Color scenography for a production of Verdi's Falstaff
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"An essential feature of Shakespeare’s art is his characters’ psychological dynamism: in his plays, a soliloquy is not the static articulation of something the character already knows; rather, it is the locus of change, of self-interrogation and epiphany....For an opera to feel Shakespearean, it needs to enact, in the music, the radical instability of the characters’ inner worlds."

via NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS
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Prageeta Sharma on Marjorie Welish's "Some Street Cries"

“In Welish’s work I saw an embrace of the most wild, abstract and observational in Stevens, informed with her renewed freshness in constructing the image and its possible abstract correlative. She creates her own set of notes in her poems. Her book The Windows Flew Open broadened my universe of what the poem could be and hold as its subject: a language fueled from living in the mind."
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