BIO
Stalina Emmanuelle Villarreal lives as a rhyming-slogan creative activist. She is a Generation 1.5 poet (mexicana and Chicana), a translator, a sonic-improv collaborator, and an instructor of English. She is a Ph.D. student in the Creative Writing Program at University of Houston. Her M.F.A. in Writing is from California College of the Arts. She coauthored an article with a historian in the book Chicana Movidas (University of Texas, forthcoming). Her poetry can be found in the Rio Grande Review, Texas Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, and elsewhere. She has published translations of poetry, including Enigmas, by Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (Señal: a project of Libros Antena Books, BOMB, and Ugly Duckling Presse, 2015), but she mostly translates regiomontana poet Minerva Reynosa; they have a chapbook called Photograms of My Conceptual Heart, Absolutely Blind (Cardboard House Press, 2016).
Name and tumor removed
Invisible polluters,* no shiny scalpel. The I desaperece.
Your dorsal skin befuddled:
You turn
your back,
expose
the pores,
burn* red;
the cells
contort,*
*mutate.
Mal,* mal.*
(Your *toxin-induced hormonal shift minimizes your androgen.)
Your male hormones shrink,
personify an un-
developed coo.
M’ijo, despierta.
(Your dove segment needs more vocal chords.)
Silence. (Chemicals burn a non-penis, or so you perceive your androgen to think so.) I want, I love.
After
surgery, the doctor
said, “You_______
*scar well.”
My glottal stop
The landfill* next to my_________home, so trash!*
What?!___________(Language
in
construction.) Ma’ t’àan.
The build framed my reference.
Lost, a
friendly stern gesture pauses ¿coraje?
. . . a
continuation of *confusion . . . derrumba* sinapsis
Proof. Why are you *shooting film at me? Camera violence.* Ma’ t’àan.
Houston, el sueño sería
to zone______the industrial*
away from
the residential; pero Houston
qué mal,* mal:* *sin zoning.
Ma’ t’àan.
Agape,____I
absorb.*
I shut
my mouth.
Uy, mastico
y como el veneno*
del barrio. Mal,*
mal.* Achiote
looks
like iron dirt
Annatto
covers muenster
cheese like
pretty iron.
Ma’ t’àan.
DNA mutation.
Mal,* mal.*
Ma’ t’àan.