Jonathan Andrew Pérez, Esq.
In honor of Luis N. Morones
Orphic day laborers' trees –
I.C.E. – border-state guards struck
the lot, tangerines dropped into the rucksack of the underworld.
Fist-full, documentation, rose-red grounded fingers totter,
like Palominos on a day laborer’s tintop.
Oral
history
catch the Federation of Latinx
Workers
Transformative -frittered-ladyfingered
loud machinery, Industry, more than fingers
snap, culled, jammed, a cloud less thing
like spiritualism, peeled-back skin in the two fires of this world
in the lap of a mountaintop—
meta-
socialist
the eight unions of strike
eclipsed.
whispered in hybridato, in Paqariq
Tampu, senses the community’s silent steel
trucks; haul to the hanging — in mines, local acrostic, custom song
Eurydice’s recurrent scheme in the binary:
The underworld, or a walkabout.
Pure
arbitrage
for history
to unite
No sun, no moon, just day-
in day-out, the Cananea Strike of 1906,
a conceit, for the grandchildren of midnight,
1928 left a song of body parts
before the end of the roads, meet.
Strike
materialize
the soil is the beginning
and rise of sky
down ridges, out copper
mines, a faint Corrido rung, no more due-paying
no master anomalies– dripped line-by-line,
repatriating what no broken fingers could have lost
from giving up, its collective grip.
Jonathan Andrew Pérez, Esq. has published poetry online and in print in but
not limited to: Prelude, The River Heron Review, Blood Tree Literature, The
Write Launch, Meniscus Literary Journal, Rigorous, The Florida Review,
Panoply Magazine, The Raw Art Review, Junto Magazine, Blood Tree
Literature, Cold Mountain Review, Piltdown Review, Yes, Adelaide Literary
Magazine, Mud Season Review, Meat for Tea: the Valley Review, Poached Hair,
The Esthetic Apostle, The Tulane Review, Spectrum Journal, The Tiny
Journal, Muse/ A Journal, The Bookends Review, The Westchester Review,
Metafore, Crack the Spine Quarterly, Silver Needle Press, Projector
Magazine, Cape Cod Poetry Review, Rise Up Review, BARNHOUSE, The Chicago
Quarterly Review, The Worcester Review, Abstract: Contemporary Expressions,
Cathexis Northwest Press, Inklette, Rumblefish Quarterly, K’in, Waxing and
Waning, Guesthouse, The Minnesota Review by Duke U Press, the Tulane
Review, Hiram Poetry Review and Quiddity on NPR. He has published poetry in
Poetry Magazine.
Jonathan’s first chapbook, The Cartographer of Crumpled Maps: The Justice
Elegies (2020) was published by Finishing Line Press, and his second
manuscript, The Diving: Dark was The Night of Justice, won the Burnside
Review Chapbook Prize and is scheduled for 2021.
Jonathan was selected by Cave Canem in 2018, and 2019 for workshops with
Cortney Lamar Charleston, and at the Virginia Quarterly with Jericho Brown.
He is a Pushcart Prize Nominee in Poetry 2019, and in the best of
Micro-fiction in 2020. He won the Split Lip Poetry Prize for 2019, and the
Burnside Review Chapbook Prize, 2020.
He has a day job as a trial attorney.
Ovenbird Poetry 