Lourdes Figueroa is chicanx oral poet. Her poems are a dialogue of her lived experience when her family worked in el azadón in Yolo County. The words el azadón are used by the ones who work in the fields — the work of tilling the soil under the blistering sun. She is the author of the chapbook Ruidos = To Learn Speak, completed during her Alley Cat Books Residency and her poem “Pieces from YOLOTL" was nominated for a Pushcart prize by Quite Lightning. Her chapbook Vuelta was recently published by Nomadic Press. She works and lives in Oakland with her wife, filmmaker, Peggy Peralta and their red nose pitbull Agnés. She is a native of limbo nation. Lourdes continues to believe in your lung and your throat.
Yolotl
aconpañame
al nacimiento de
the shoot of the wheat
the bud of the corn
birth of teocintle
daughter of
nahua girl born on the fence of iron and rust nahua girl born on the center of the vagus there is coal in your mouth as we wonder across the forest they have told us that there is gold and silver in the heart of the tree but we dig underneath the tunnel of the volcano to find a jugular vein with a mouth there it spits out fields of the sugar cane nahua girl brew the agave the galleon sits amidst she calls it occidental there are oceans between us as we learn to swallow bourbon there were hundreds of chicotazos on her back nahua girl your skin is changing it glistens under the five moons under the five suns we have arrived the cotton fields have made them golden we are ancient in our song nahua girl