Paul Aponte is a Chicano Poet from Sacramento. He is a member of the writers group Escritores Del Nuevo Sol, and also a board member of Círculo De Poetas & Writers. He has been published in several anthologies and online blogs, and is currently out and about promoting his book called DEL CACTUS available through Prickly Pear Press and Amazon.com.

SHINE

Is this real?
Are we truly physically here?
Mourning doves flock,
cooing their comforting sounds.

This infallible Earth
filled with fallible people.

These sights, these sounds.
This wind, this shine.
This green, this blue.

Failing each other.
When oceans sing lullabies,
and the ground waits patiently.

- Paul Aponte

JoAnn Anglin is an original member of Los Escritores del Nuevo Sol / Writers of the New Sun. She also belongs to the Circulo of Poets & Writers, and to the Sacramento Poetry Center. She has worked with CA Poets in the Schools, with the Poetry Out Loud program as well as in others, and with the State of California’s Arts in Corrections program, teaching poetry writing for 8 years at New Folsom State Prison.

MARKET RATE

Somebody decided who

can live there, not here.

And someone conspired the

rationale, the reasonable 

compromise, and claimed the

alternative to be equal, mostly. 

Some humans knew how

to use, to make documents, and

slid in the provisions, the 

tweezered words, laid in

the terms some realtor could

understand as aversion 

of problems and could say,

They have their own. 

Which is there.

And not here.

- JoAnn Anglin