Paloma Martínez-Cruz | Other Bombs

Other Bombs: poems by Paloma Martínez-Cruz. Number 1 in our Allison Joseph Series, selected by Allison Joseph.

[ cover art: Diana Solis, Rage Against the Machine, 2016 ]

Publication:  October 26, 2023 [100 copies]
29 pages
ISBN 978-1-960693-10-5
$ 12.00

Paloma MartÍnez-Cruz is a professor of Latinx Cultural Studies at The Ohio State University, and author of Food Fight! Millennial Mestizaje Meets the Culinary Marketplace (2019) and Women and Knowledge in Mesoamerica: From East L.A. to Anahuac (2011). She is the editor of A Handbook for the Rebel Artist in a Post-Democratic Society (2021) and a core member of the performance art troupe La Pocha Nostra. Her poetry and fiction have appeared in Voces, PALABRA, About Place Journal, Boundless: Anthology of the 14th Annual Rio Grande Valley International Poetry Festival, and elsewhere. Martínez-Cruz curates and hosts Onda Latinx Ohio, an arts initiative showcasing Latinx arts in the Midwest.

“PMC’s poetry rocks en español! Her collection is a codex for Malinche’s lost and found daughters weaving a protection spell for illegal identities from Aztlán and beyond. A Chicanx must read!”

–Guillermo Gómez-Peña

How to Date White Guys

Go on a road trip and have your first fight
which is ostensibly over the music selection
but is really about his arrogance
go to his house on Mexican Independence Day
where he surprises you with a dinner of chiles en nogada
listen as he tells the story of how he met Jimmy Carter on a plane
(his grip was like a bag of squirrel elbows and his eyes were like soup)
drink mezcal and dance around his house
to your mother’s José José records
try to help him pronounce “del mundo”
from “el día más triste del mundo”
so that the D hardens and softens in the right way
which, when you see it written here
sounds like you are talking about dick, but you are, in fact
trying to help him with his Spanish 
prepare for the excitement of the first time he achieves a rhotic trill
he’ll wait in ambush outside the shower:
Arroz

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