ESTA BOCA ES MÍA – Lupita Limón Corrales

[Nueoi; 2024]

Tr. from the English by Alexia Veytia-Rubio 

I received ESTA BOCA ES MÍA shipped between two pieces of cardboard like a work of art, bound by red string and glue that still feels slightly sticky. Hands intently collected and bound these pages with care and attention. Poetry is often conceived of as ephemeral, abstract, and difficult to grasp. These terms don’t apply to Lupita Limón Corrales’s collection, which firmly plants itself in the world, in the palm of your hand: red ink for Spanish text, black for English, yellow pages for guest contributions, a photo of what people in the know will recognize as local Oakland architecture, and a muted, grainy cover artwork by Ricardo Arenas V of the Virgen de Guadalupe surrounded by images of Minnie Mouse.

Just as the book testifies to the craft behind the art object, each piece of text demonstrates the collaborative ethos of Limón Corrales’s work. The Editor’s Note, Translator’s Note, dedication, and guest poems all contribute to the fullness of ESTA BOCA ES MÍA, placing it in the context of a network of people and places—friendships and comradeships forged at the library or at the tenant union meeting. The last yellow page is a blank NOTES/NOTAS page, inviting the reader to join in the process of envisioning futures and presents of connection, collective action, and mutual care. Expanded networks and lineages also appear in epigraphs and poems honoring artists and movement figures throughout history. The Editor’s Note beautifully calls upon the verse of Nicaraguan poet and novelist Gioconda Belli to indicate the power and tenacity of the tiny book: “If you think your life can never make a difference, you have never been in bed with a mosquito.” ESTA BOCA ES MÍA, printed in tiny text (perhaps the book’s only aesthetic drawback for some readers), packs a joyful punch.

The poems in ESTA BOCA ES MÍA reflect on housing justice, displacement, incarceration, and genocide, but they do so mainly by honoring the people experiencing these struggles. Friends, family, neighbors, and strangers all feature in her poems, appearing unruly and full of faith. We meet Shabina, the friend who helps hang the NOT FOR SALE banner outside the window, the speaker’s Nana who slips her some cash on her way home, and the Uber driver who regales his passengers with absurd stories about Vicente Fernández. Even the spider in the poet’s house is written of as a beloved in “NEGOTIATION STUDY #1 (ESTUDIO DE NEGOCIACIÓN #1)”:

I let the spider out of the cup myself

like saying good night to an old friend.

Thank you for coming.

(Closing the door)

Text me when you’re home.

The poem’s language is colloquial and familiar. I’ve heard and repeated that last line many times with friends and know the care it offers, as well as the boundary it implies. By writing in such a colloquial register, the way she might actually speak to friends and loved ones, Limón Corrales builds trust with the reader, promising them that they will not be without company as they make their way through the collection. This trust is important given the explicit references to violence and oppression; with the poet’s help, the reader feels equipped to read on.

Several poems ground the collection’s interpersonal focus in tenant organizing. “ALPINE STREET, PT 2 (CALLE ALPINE SEGUNDA PARTE)” consists entirely of the requests and offers of mutual aid that might occur over signal group chats and phone calls:

Help me fight for my home,
it’s 100 years old with grapes
that grow in the yard and an underground
wine cellar. Can I add you to the rapid response
chat for the mice in my walls? Come crash
the Open House! We’ll make skewers . . .

There is no single speaker here. Instead, the poem lends itself to the variety of voices that meet at the nexus of organizing and community care. While polyphonic in nature and tone, the poem’s energetic enjambment and enthusiastic orality form a collective voice, one that overwhelms any fear of facing negligent landlords or intrusive mice. Though the threat of displacement runs constantly under the surface of the collection, such threats are forced to yield to Limón Corrales’s lines, which invoke an almost magical counter-pulse of shared intention and struggle. “OJO DE AGUA” illustrates the nature of the generosity that emerges from these collective efforts:

The street lights turn on at sunset still

for free. Everything else is what we give

like candlelight to each other.

This we appears throughout the collection, referencing both a general collective force and a specific group of people with whom the speaker holds the picket line. While these lines hint toward scarcity, they highlight the resource of mutual care. In this way, two dynamics of exchange are constructed throughout ESTA BOCA ES MÍA; one entails a fight against the powers that be for fundamental rights, and the other consists of what is given and received freely among those fighting beside you.

With a large focus on her experiences in tenant organizing, Limón Corrales’s poems are also rooted in a sense of locality. Poems reference Mohawk Street and the Transbay Tunnel, the church across the street and the neon sex shop next door. Communities are made of relationships not only between people but between people and places—between us and our homes, the plants that grow on the sidewalk, the basements we gather in to chat and strategize. The places we live in and their histories are specific, Limón Corrales shows, and just as people are not disposable, neither are their homes, sidewalks, or fruit trees.

However, throughout the collection a thread is stretched between localities, connecting people whose struggles echo across distances. Specifically, Limón Corrales builds a bridge to Gaza in the first lines of the collection’s first poem, “OLD LINENS (SÁBANAS VIEJAS),” drawing parallels between development, demolition, and the domicide of nonstop aerial attacks:

In the houses around me

that have not become rubble

white blouses and towels

on the clotheslines catch the light

for a few minutes and appear pink.

Limón Corrales references destruction almost offhandedly here, placing the threat in close proximity. This acknowledgement quickly asserts a sense of solidarity, while exalting home—the structure and the concept—as a place where, undisturbed, beauty can occur. She goes on to address the war on Gaza directly in “DIVINITY’S GUESTS”:

In this war against children,

against fathers who survived

being children, in the war against

olive trees and bakeries, libraries

and poetry, in this war against

living, I take my position

on the side of eternity.

Here, the olive trees in Gaza like the bougainvillea in Los Angeles are likewise witnesses to and victims of displacement and destruction. As with the spider in her cup, Limón Corrales highlights the relationships between the human and nonhuman, and between people facing different, but interconnected struggles. She maps her solidarity internationally as well as locally, down to the roots as well as across the ocean.

While embracing the principled discipline of struggle, Limón Corrales’s poems are full of joy, pleasure, and connection where some may expect only despair. In ESTA BOCA ES MÍA, community organizing takes the form of karaoke and backseat mariachi in addition to eviction court and cacerolazos. In Emma’s dancing, Leila’s ecstatic glimpse of her homeland from above, and her mother’s makeshift home in the party supply store, Limón Corrales finds inspiration for her bewildering and fugitive optimism, which knows that there is something to fight for, and that if you fight for it, it is already out there somewhere, waiting for you. She nurtures a rare sense of belonging: “I don’t feel / like someone’s lost daughter / more like everyone’s daughter.” I wonder how she got so lucky, but she writes the instructions in each poem, linking herself to the people and places around her despite uncertainty, conflict, and stacked odds.

Three poems are dedicated to historical and contemporary figures and writers: the anarchist Emma Goldman, poet and former Sandinista Daisy Zamora, and Palestinian militant Leila Khaled. Limón Corrales’s tribute to Goldman invokes the legendary anarchist’s vibrant spirit, dismissed as “frivolous” by her comrades for dancing and embracing pleasure alongside her activism:

Against the laws of her enemies

and the politics of her friends

she organized a body

made of heaven, not of jail.

“Organized a body” takes on varying meanings here, referring both to the collective organizing of a movement “body” and the movement of the individual body which organizes itself across rhythms and sensations. Like Goldman, Limón Corrales refuses to disavow joy and pleasure in favor of a sanitized and dreary utopia.

In “AFTER DAISY,” the poet explores the experience of women revolutionaries, who helped overthrow a dictatorship while menstruating, giving birth, and watching their husbands take other lovers. While this particular revolution was won, its women soldiers were “left . . . to plan another revolution,” knowing they’d continue to be considered secondary even in victory. Lastly, Limón Corrales pays homage to Khaled, touching on the longing for her homeland that drove Khaled to take up arms against occupation:

In the sky, everyone misses their land.

God willing, everyone lands safely.

The fighters say they will sleep under a tree

for three days when Palestine is finally free.

The tree must be there, waiting.

Diverging from the swift momentum of other poems in the collection, these lines move slowly and pause, considering the stillness of those few surreal moments in the air above Palestine. Perhaps the poet chooses to reflect on this historical moment when the world we dream of feels far away. Through these tributes, Limón Corrales writes herself into a lineage of revolutionary, anarchist, and militant women and writers, citing her own political and literary inspirations.

I hadn’t heard of Daisy Zamora before reading Limón Corrales’s poem, which sent me down a literary research trail. Zamora was not only a militant Sandinista during Nicaragua’s revolution against the multi-generational Somoza dictatorship, but then served as Nicaragua’s Vice Minister of Culture alongside Ernesto Cardenal, who is a literary hero of mine—a poet, revolutionary, and liberation theologian. Like Cardenal, Limón Corrales invokes a liberatory spirituality in her poems, whose protagonists call upon God to help them resist and endure:

The morning of the march

Lulu prays and it’s God who lights

the concrete path where she blocks

traffic. Like it was God

who taught her to flip tables

Here, prayers serve to incite rather than replace action. Traditional religious figures take on a subversive role in Limón Corrales’s poems; they choose a side, not only in theory, but in practice. Limón Corrales joins a tradition of poets, many of them from Latin America, who do not abandon faith, but who draw the anti-oppressive wisdom it offers.

Limón Corrales writes in English, presenting the original poems alongside their Spanish translations by Alexia Veytia-Rubio, addressing English- and Spanish-speaking audiences in both California and Mexico, where the book is also sold. The choice allows the English-speaking reader (myself included) to stumble over their own assumptions of English as the linguistic default or final destination.

Those who read Spanish will notice that Veytia-Rubio often (though not always) chooses gender neutral language when translating terms referring to mixed-gender groups of people, where traditional Spanish defaults to masculinization. She uses vecines rather than vecinos (neighbors), nosotres rather than nosotros (us), and enemigues rather than enemigos (enemies), a maneuver which I’m sure would make Limón Corrales’s enemies squirm. By doing so, Veytia-Rubio queers the Spanish in a way that typically only happens through personal and possessive pronouns in English; the words Veytia-Rubio de-masculinizes in Spanish are already gender-neutral in English. By defaulting to gender-neutral language in Spanish, Veytia-Rubio reflects the communal and liberatory ethos of Limón Corrales’s poems—the collection as a whole is clearly written, translated, and read outside of and against a patriarchal gaze.

This orientation toward a queer and expansive lens is affirmed in Veytia-Rubio’s Translator’s Note, where she states that “translation isn’t a copy or a clone,” but rather “an echo of a mirror image of a place of struggle.” This philosophy of translation tracks with the themes of the collection, setting aside an allegiance to purity or rules in favor of a “more treasured logic,” as proposed in PRAYER FOR RELIEF (ORACIÓN DE ALIVIO), a generative relationship between two writers and languages. Veytia-Rubio constructs in Spanish, as Limón Corrales does in English, a “body / made of heaven, not of jail.” Presented next to each other on the page, the bilingual poems speak to and dance with one another, not claiming to be the same, but choosing to be together.

The contributions by additional poets at the end of the collection, many of whom are named earlier in Limón Corrales’s poems, close out the collection in an offer of reciprocity. In “A HABIT, NOSTALGIA, OR DREAM,” Sara Selevitch recounts various moves, kitchens, and moments spanning eight years in Los Angeles, honoring the people who carry a sense of home through change. “NEW CHAIN MAIL” by Shabina Toorawa illustrates the group’s network of friends and comrades with tenderness and admiration, remembering moments at protests in front of arms manufacturing plants and during walks by the riverbank. Beni Avalos zooms in on that which can’t be stolen or destroyed—the connections to our beloveds, the moments we share with them—in “SATURN RETURNS.” To conclude the collection, in “UNTITLED #37 (‘SO GOODBYE YELLOW BRICK ROOOAD!’),” Mallory Bea writes of the intimacy and shared joy that Limón Corrales nurtures throughout the collection.

Well, Bea almost concludes ESTA BOCA ES MÍA—that privilege and responsibility is actually given to us, the readers, in the form of the empty NOTES/NOTAS section. Here, we are invited to join the web of collective world-building. I might write: “My roof leaks when it rains, too.” Maybe I should text my landlord about it again. Maybe I should ask a friend for help.

Liliana Torpey is a writer from Oakland, California. She is currently pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing at San Francisco State University, focusing on poetry and literary translation. Her writing has appeared in The Rumpus, NACLA, and Euronews Culture.