52
NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W
Winter 2024
FINALIST, 2023 JAMES APPLEWHITE POETRY PRIZE BY LOSS PEQUEÑO GLAZIER
This is the First Question I Ask This is the first question I ask when I run into Diego Rivera at his mural in the Hotel del Prado. “It’s completely obvious,” he grunts with a brassy accent, a wave of his brush spattering the air with alizarin crimson. Pigment plunges stirringly into ectoplasmic blue undertones. I’m drawn into his mural’s world, Sueño de una tarde dominical en la Alameda Central. Its muted hues spark vivid connections between Dream of a Sunday Afternoon and my family history. In it, Frida Kahlo acerbically holds a black-and-white yin yang symbol. Beside her is child-self Diego in breeches and striped knee socks, pockets stuffed with boyish objects, string, a lizard. Next to Diego is Nuestra Catrina, wearing an Aztec serpent boa. “People dream,” Diego ruminates, “They walk. History is there. You want to know who you were before your parents were born?” To the left, behind a bench where three campesinos are totally zonked, Diego has meticulously layered in a snapshot portrait of my progenitors. I see the round nimbus of a baby’s head, me.
LOSS PEQUEÑO GLAZIER is Professor Emeritus of Media Study at SUNY Buffalo, NY, and Director at the Electronic Poetry Center. His work focuses on meetings between language and technology. Among his print books are Digital Poetics: The Making of E-Poetries (University of Alabama Press, 2002), Anatman, Pumpkin Seed, Algorithm (Salt, 2003), and Luna Lunera: Poems al-Andalus (Night Horn Books, 2020). He has also authored digital, online-only works such as White-Faced Bromeliads on 20 Hectares (Electronic Poetry Center, 1999), Io Sono at Swoons (Electronic Poetry Center, 2002), and Territorio Libre (Electronic Poetry Center, 2003), as well as poems, essays, films, and projects for dance, music, installation, and performance. He now lives and creates ecopoetry in the mountains of western North Carolina.