Sneak Peek from This City

Asi

This is the city that saw the raw mass of me, the quick and slow of me, the I’m afraid and I can’t of me, the it’s beyond me side of me. This is the place that showed me I fit. I take space. This city let me, let me, be. My hair really is that size side of me, each shaft an electric tendril vibrating its own, humming life, the untamable side of me. See how the world dances above my eyebrows? This continent plus that continent, together, on y va ensemble, vamos juntos, side of me. The city that said, “Me gustas asi,” don’t comb down anything, don’t tame nothing, pa’que? The leaf that blows away in autumn and returns breaking bark in spring. The leaf, the branch, the trunk, the root, the tree, all of it, I am all of it. Asi. Aqui.

By Claudia Castro Luna from her forthcoming Floating Bridge Press chapbook This City.

Originally published by Poetry Northwest.

Claudia Castro Luna writes poetry and non-fiction. She is Seattle’s first Civic Poet (2015-2017), a King County 4Culture grant recipient, a 2014 Jack Straw Fellow and VONA alumna. Born in El Salvador she came to the United States in 1981 escaping civil war. She has an MA in Urban Planning, a teaching certificate and an MFA in poetry. Her poems appear in print and on-line in publications such as the Taos Journal of International Poetry and Art, La Bloga, ARCADE and Poetry Northwest among others. Living in English and Spanish, Claudia writes and teaches in Seattle where she gardens and keeps chickens with her husband and their three children.