Poems by Ramón García ​

Valley News
 
Out in the fields bordering the suburbs
an eighteen-year-old Oaxacan girl, six months pregnant,
collapsed picking grapes in the 110 degree heat.
 
Nonetheless, the summer has resurrected
itself on air conditioning, Kool-Aid,
Little League baseball games, swimming pools….
 
I have already lived this summer
and will have to live it once again.
 
I wonder what happened to those
poor white prostitutes with bad teeth
who worked the sad motels on Crows Landing Road
and their junky brothers
riding bicycles wearing someone else’s
ripped blue jeans
all the days of all the summer afternoons
of my American childhood
the pawn shops in Modesto may still be circulating
their stolen knives and watches.
 
The Mexicans keep coming into the Valley
they will keep coming as long as there are summers
and crops and the manufactured fruits of the earth.
 
Oh, Lord, the kids will be playing baseball,
the swimming pools will be boiling,
by the Fourth of July there will be a murder or two
in the Airport district, where gangs are fighting. 
There is no way to leave the summer.
 
From Other Countries (What Books Press, 2010)




They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?
 
 
For years I lived in the Van Nuys building, a neglected Beaux Arts building on South Spring
Street where more noir films had once been filmed than anywhere else.  Somehow, it had
eluded Downtown redevelopment.  Not up to code, the renters half in hiding, pilgrims
in dark transitions: it was Notes from the Underground for the new and last millennium.  I
thought I was building character, but even now I don’t know if I was punishing myself or was
paralyzed by fear, student debt and loneliness.  There was the dirt and shabbiness that
tarnished La Dolce Vita imaginings.  Daily encounters with updated Day of the Locust
 characters I excused as interesting and colorful, Tinseltown picturesque.  There was a
couple who kept a hog for a pet that made the hallway of the third floor smell like a barn.
The husband was a cross-dresser and his wife got on the clanky elevator with sunglasses
on, to hide black eyes from wife beatings.
Nothing has changed inside the labyrinth of dusty corridors, but rents have tripled and keep
rising. Something of me died there, to be reborn a half block away, in the recovered
splendors of air conditioning and heating, building maintenance, the absence of leaks in
times of rain.

Ramón García’s is the author of Strange Signatures (Walton Well Press, 2025), The Chronicles (Red Hen Press, 2015) and Other Countries (What Books Press, 2010), a monograph on the artist Ricardo Valverde (University of Minnesota Press, 2013) and a chapbook Strays (Foundlings Press, 2021).   His poetry has appeared in circulo de poesía, the Best American Poetry anthology, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Gulf Coast and Plume.   He is a former Vice-President of the Board of Trustees at Beyond Baroque in Venice, California.  A founding member of What Books Press, he is Associate Editor of Plume literary journal.  He teaches at CSU Northridge.
https://ramongarciaphd.com/

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