From the Creative Editor

Abstract

From the Creative Editor Alfredo Franco (bio) In this issue we are proud to welcome back two poets, Margarita Pintado and Randy John Koch, who have enriched past issues of Chiricú. In her newest work, Pintado responds to the natural (and political) disasters that have shaken her native Puerto Rico in recent years. We also bring you one of her rare poems in English, the moving pandemic-themed “I Walk with My Son.” In the five poems from Against the Risen Flesh, Koch continues his extraordinary voicings of historical figures who partook in the colonization of the Americas; in this set, two personages in particular stand out, victims in their own right of Spanish imperialism and bigotry—the Black slave Francisco de Eguía, who inadvertently introduced smallpox to Mexico, and Hernando Alonso, the first Jew to arrive in New Spain, and who was subsequently burned at the stake. Appearing in Chiricú for the first time are three of the finest Latinx poets writing in English today: Jose Hernandez Diaz, heidi andrea restrepo rhodes, and Orlando Ricardo Menes. Diaz’s beautifully limpid, direct poems celebrate the hard-won dignity of Mexican American life, while rhodes’s powerful, Whitmanian lines rage at the failures and abuses of America, including racism, mass incarceration, and imperialism. (Like Whitman, rhodes contains multitudes—“I are.”) Menes movingly evokes the dissolute life and haunting work of the Cuban painter Fidelio Ponce de Leon (1895–1949). Our fiction offerings include new work by Cristina Garcia, who revisits the character of Pilar Puente, the heroine of her seminal novel, Dreaming in Cuban. Now middle-aged, a mother and a successful painter, Pilar keeps a diary in which she bears witness to both the COVID-19 pandemic and the absurdities of the Trump administration; she struggles, like Akhmatova during the Stalinist era, to continue creating in the face of fear, isolation, and death. For a view of the pandemic from a Brazilian perspective, we recommend Reginaldo da Luz Pujol Filho’s searing short story “Abril ou setembro.” David S. Dalton’s short story “Cadena perpetua” is an absorbing account of domestic abuse and self-laceration, while Ana-Christina Acosta Gaspar de Alba’s “Historias” charts a young woman’s journey back to Mexico to confront her and her family’s past. Victor Ladis Schultz’s “S.A.” is a wonderful example of Latinx “weird fiction” that might remind readers of the early Julio Cortázar, while emerging [End Page 123] Chicano writer Enrique Calzada Varela keeps us at the edge of our seats with an epic boxing match/video game that promises a sense of transcendence, or outright revenge, to oppressed peoples. May the creative pieces in this issue bring you insight, inspiration, and hope during these troubled times. [End Page 124] Alfredo Franco Rutgers University, New Brunswick Alfredo Franco Alfredo Franco teaches creative writing at Rutgers University (New Brunswick). His work has appeared in Blackbird, failbetter, The MacGuffin, and other journals. He is Associate Editor at Choice Magazine Listening and has edited the literary sections of two past issues of Chiricú Journal. Copyright © 2021 The Trustees of Indiana University