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Posts Tagged ‘Regina Garcia’

Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos

Posted in Imagery, tagged Bill Griffin, cosmology, Dark Matter, imagery, NC Poets, poetry, Regina Garcia, Regina YC Garcia, Southern writing, Vera Rubin, Whispers from the Multiverse on July 18, 2025| 9 Comments »

[with 3 poems by Regina YC Garcia]

Maybe God is the Moon

Maybe it was the Moon

that bore me up

placed me on its Moon back

when my light was low

so low I could not speak,

could not utter, when I was

sliced and excluded from

my own voice.

Maybe it was the Moon that

circled me through stages,

plunged me into cold and

silent darkness, turned me away

from the light of a prideful sun,

shocked and awakened my skin,

nestled me in craters where my

breath did not matter, allowed me to

emerge in stages so that I,

perched high, could witness that

indeed, the wages of living is Death,

paid early or late, and the tides

will live longer than I

Maybe it was the Moon that tenderly

slid me down its beam back into the fray

reminded me of how to walk, to hide, to emerge

to cry for, to try to find a

human space of other MoonMadeOvers

Maybe it was the Moon that reanimated

my soul, filled it with purpose, taught me

how to line this pathway back to wherever

I need to be . . .

Regina YC Garcia

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With every passing year we know there is more we don’t know. We have made better and more detailed maps of the surface of the moon than we have of the floor of our own oceans. When we look out into the cosmos we aren’t certain whether it would look the same to any observer from any different space or time, and we wonder: do the same laws of physics apply everywhere? The stuff that makes the sun and the earth, that makes felines and fish and blackflies, that makes oak trees and brain cells, the “ordinary matter” of atoms like Carbon, Hydrogen, Oxygen, and all those other elements, all that stuff only adds up to 15% of the matter in the universe – what is the other 85%?

The word galaxy derives from Greek, the same root as galactose, milk sugar: the Milky Way, our home sweet home. In the 1960’s astrophysicist Vera Ruben and her collaborator Kent Ford build the most advanced cosmic spectrograph to date. They used it to measure the spins of distant galaxies, their rates of revolution. The data didn’t add up. When Dr. Rubin estimated each galaxy’s mass (based on its luminous stars), it should be spinning far more slowly than their measurements showed. A whole lot of mass was missing. Were Isaac Newton and the laws of gravity wrong, or did the galaxy contain vast quantities of matter Rubin couldn’t see? Sixty years later and physicists still don’t know exactly what Dark Matter is — maybe WIMP’s (weakly interactive massive particle), maybe a proposed theoretical particle they named axion, maybe something even weirder. They know they don’t know.

The Vera C. Rubin Observatory is now coming online in Chile. It uses the largest digital camera ever produced (3.2 gigapixels) to create wide-field images of the entire Southern sky every few nights as it pursues its LSST mission, the Legacy Survey of Space and Time. Besides mapping the Milky Way (perhaps in more detail than maps of our own oceans’ floor) it will study Dark Energy and Dark Matter. Tonight I’ll be reading the final chapters of Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos by Dennis Overbye. He follows the lives and discoveries of twentieth century cosmologists like Hubble, Sandage, Hawking, Rubin as they ask the big questions: How old is the universe? How big? How did it begin? What is it made of? And Why?! Astrophysicist Overbye wrote his book in 1991. With every year that has passed since then, I know there is even more that I don’t know!

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Brown Girls Jumping

While seeing The Original Pinettes at Bullets NightClub, New Orleans, Louisiana

I went to Louisiana

Me, a North Carolina Bama

& I found my power

in my hair

the hair that I shook

to an all-girl brass band

Yea . . . the baddest

The trumpets blared &

the tuba thumped &

the Brown girls jumped

& shook that hair &

didn’t care

if they had a little

a lot

or none

. . . didn’t care

what vile people said

Their manes were present

or invisibly gifted through

special dispensation from God

An aura just

flowing

around their shoulders

down their back

swinging

blowing

showing the world that

it doesn’t matter what people say

Their strength comes from some

ethereal

divine

supernatural

sublime force

cloaked in music &

revealed as a spirit

felt behind

closed eyes

tingling in

dancing feet &

snapping fingers

The train from their manes

envelops

endows

entreats

favor and power

See, if Delilah had really felt her own

She would have left Samson alone

For his emasculation did not lead to her divination

Swing your hair, Brown girls &

cast your cares

to that which protects & inspires

your own strength

Brown girls jumping

Music thumping in NOLA

Me, a NC Bama on a holiday mission . . .

taking two fish, a few loaves

and a little hot sauce . . .

Hands folded in prayer . . .

. . . praying that this holy meal multiplies

before my season ends.

Regina YC Garcia

❦ ❦ ❦

Regina Garcia is a Black Whitman. She summons and channels the ancestors – within her there are multitudes. She sings the Black body electric. Songs loud and joyful, songs longing and plaintive, elegy and celebration and prophecy all flow from her pen. The voices that whisper from the multiverse crack open dimensions and crack our minds open to reveal a person, a family, a people leaping to reach for our hands and dance us into new knowing. Before I read Whispers from The Multiverse, I pattered along in a different cosmos. I am now filled with joy to have crossed into this real one.

❦

Read more about Regina YC Garcia and Whispers from The Multiverse HERE, and order your copy from Willow Books/Aquarius press HERE.

Regina’s written and video poetry has been published widely in a variety of journals, reviews, compositions, and anthologies such as South Florida Poetry Journal, Main Street Rag, The AutoEthnographer, Amistad, The Elevation Review and others. Her poetic work for The Black Light Project, a documentary focused on real and often untold narratives of African American males in the United States, was featured on a Mid-South Emmy-Award winning episode of PBS Muse. She teaches English and is the Coordinator of Global Programs at Pitt Community College in Winterville and Greenville, North Carolina.

Stellaria pubera – Star Chickweed

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Windsor of the Water

The Truth and Speculation of Windsor Wade

Sea misted brown skin

skirted the winds and battled the waves

that he might see a glorious

future despite his inglorious condition

. . . that his conscription to pulling nets

would not be for naught

thinking beyond bondage and living beyond

shackles . . . H would see Shackleford Banks and Jack’s

Lump as victory for himself . . . . . . for his family

. . . and so from Windsor to Nancy to

Rachael to others to me . . .

We still sing the victory

Ancestral voices still trill in the wind

as today, the wild horses run unfettered, free

Regina YC Garcia

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The Cosmological Principle states that the universe, when observed at a large enough scale, is homogenous – smooth, not lumpy – and that the properties of the universe are the same for all observers. In other words, the laws of physics operate the same in every part of the universe and the universe is not just playing with us when we try to observe it.

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Lie Lay Lain

Posted in Imagery, poetry, tagged Bill Griffin, Charlotte Lit, Jenny Hubbard, litmosphere, Morrow Dowdle, NC Poets, poetry, Rebecca Valley, Regina Garcia, Southern writing on July 5, 2024| 7 Comments »

[with poems from LITMOSPHERE 2024]

The evening darkens and comes on

+++ for James Wright

++++++++++ 1

I have a good friend who doesn’t like birds.

She says it’s the flapping. I say how can you,

a first grade public school teacher, not like birds?

I say it every time we meet at the bar

for a French 75 served in a crystal flute – How

Can You. Not Like. Birds. They’re too loud,

she says. God. I need her to be reasonable.

++++++++++ 2

Three cardinals in the hedge have fledged.

They peep in surround sound, one in a flower pot,

one on the low branch of the magnolia, one smack

in the middle of the street, the mother hopping

like mad to nudge it to the safety of boxwoods,

her waxy orange beak a crayon of devotion,

her road baby terrified out of its bird brain.

++++++++++ 3

I’m sorry, Mr. Wright, I ever called your poem

worthless, the famous one with the hammock

and the horse shit flaring like gold in the waning

of day. I hear your voice read through the night.

We have not paid attention. Birds slam into glass,

into windows we are not looking out of. Every

new poem, every new life, such a warning.

Jenny Hubbard

❦ ❦ ❦

I can picture it lying on the hutch where she laid it not long after they bought the beach house in 1993, and where it has lain ever since. A novelty dinner plate, memento of her years as a teacher, sometimes buried under other plates or the detritus of grandkids visiting and large noisy family groups dining together. There it lies yet, solid and steadfast, secure in its lesson. Every year or two we rediscover it and laugh, so obscure, so obvious, the motto glazed in its simple school marm font: Lie, Lay, Lain. Who but a school teacher actually knows the correct usage, Lie vs. Lay, much less uses it consistently in conversation? Who but a teacher or a teacher’s child?

Linda jabs me in the ribs when the murder suspect on TV says, “I left the gun laying right there” and I expostulate, “Lying!” The gun, not the suspect. Am I such an ostentatious stickler that I have to correct every grammatical impropriety I encounter? Or am I maybe saying it out loud to re-teach myself? I check its feel on my tongue as the intransitive slides across. An homage to mom and all she taught me. Never forget, never forsake your upbringing. In 100 years the OED will list “Lay, laid, laid: verb, intransitive” as acceptable common usage, but until then I’m not going to lay around waiting.

❦

This evening, behind me, Dad is lying immobile where the nurses have laid him. Wake Forest Baptist Hospital- we’ve finally settled into his tenth floor room after 36 hours in the Emergency Department. He’s asleep, comfortable, the hard collar that is protecting his fractured cervical vertebra no longer agitating him. I’m reading a little poster beside his bed , the Johns Hopkins Mobility Goal Calculator. Level 5 is stand unsupported; Level 10 is walk 250 feet. Oh no, not Level 1: lay in bed! We’ve laid Dad in bed but he will have to do the rest of his lying there on his own with no help from Johns Hopkins. Lie still, Dad. Tomorrow I hope we can say that you lay restfully all night and will have lain free of pain throughout the day. I’ll be sure I say that right when I report to Mom.

. ❦ ❦ ❦

A Universe, in Revolution

My patient thinks he’s the new messiah.

++++ He’s got the key to the cosmos,

just had to listen to the signals

++++ ++++ ++++ ++++ ++++ ‘til they harmonized.

He says that I am part of the plan, play a role

++++ in his rise

++++ ++++ ++++ if I will only read the scripture

he sent me off the Internet,

if I will only hear him out tomorrow. I should believe

++++ he’s delusional, but this night

++++ ++++ ++++ ++++ ++++ makes all thinks possible.

A sound in the sleeping house and my heart races,

as though the prophecy is already here, rolling

++++ like mist beneath my door.

Who is this, speaking

++++ ++++ ++++ from the wilderness?

Through the passage, a small boy kneels

++++ on his bed, facing away, fully asleep. Not wanting

to wake him and afraid not to,

++++ ++++ ++++ ++++ ++++ I kneel beside him.

He holds the corner of the blind, looks out the window

++++ where a new moon blackens the street, the driveway,

the neighbor’s yard.

++++ ++++ ++++ I want that, he says. I see nothing.

What do you want?

I want that, he says, resting one finger on the windowsill.

++++ I should believe he’s imagining things,

but this night

++++ ++++ makes all things possible, dreams

existent on a perceptive continuum and not the ghetto

++++ of reality. I lay my son upon his pillow, aspect slack.

In sleep, we are possibility,

++++ ++++ ++++ ++++ emptied of our devices.

In the morning, he’ll ask me to play. Nascent diction

++++ blurs diphthong, implores me

++++ ++++ ++++ ++++ ++++ to pray with him instead.

Thank God, this understanding. My patient awaits

with his urgent need. And what am I, on this brink?

++++ A windowsill. A secret dark. A universe,

++++ ++++ ++++ ++++ ++++ ++++ in revolution.

My son’s cheek. My lips pressed deep.

Morrow Dowdle

❦ ❦ ❦

Language. Usage. To get all hot and bothered when someone writes he ‘laid in bed all morning” is maybe as silly as rejecting on principle the dozens, hundreds of new words that enter the lexicon each year. English, world language, is endlessly pleomorphic, evolutional, contortionist, lush. Nourishing and delicious – relish it! And what better way to serve up novelty, invention, and sweet surprise than a healthy helping of poem?

The poems, fiction, and non-fiction in LITMOSPHERE 2024 have been selected from Charlotte Lit’s final Lit/South contest. As of July 1, 2024 Charlotte Center for the Literary Arts has discontinued the contest but expanded LITMOSPHERE to a twice yearly open submission journal. Submissions are open NOW, July1-31! New horizons and new opportunities are growing from something already strong and rich. Even a newly coined word will show its roots in some sound or utterance, some offshoot from fertile linguistic loam; a new poem also sprouts from the deep soil of music, rhythm, image. It may leave formal gardens to weave and sprawl across the page as a new thing; it may branch and bud into some unexpected inflorescence never before smelled or tasted.

This current LITMOSPHERE is a meadow, a forest, diverse and fruitful. It is the best of Southern creativity. This verse is not just fresh and new, it is biting and piercing. It makes me think new thoughts. It takes me into new places. Like language, poetry must be ever changing if it hopes to remain necessary and alive. To remain vital – from protoitalic gwīwō, to be alive, through Latin vivo, I live, into vita, a way of life: viable, vitality, revitalizing. This poetry is vital – relating to or characteristic of life . . . absolutely necessary.

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High John (Ipomoea Jalapa,

Bindeweed, Jalop Root)

Like King Arthur of England, he has served his people. And, like King Arthur, he is not dead. He waits to return when his people shall call him again. . . . High John de Conquer went back to Africa, but he lift his power here, and placed his American dwelling in the root of a certain plant. Only possess that root, and he can be summoned at any time. – Zora Neale Hurston in “High John De Conquer”

High John manifests

running wild in fields

crouching low in gardens

eve burrowing underground

heeding whispers and chants

for more, for better, ignoring

those who doubt his power

to restore health, to improve

conditions, to bear the fortune, to find courage

He has followed those stolen, those sorrowed,

those steadily holding hope that he will find

them, and his power will transcend their trouble

Over here, High John

High John, so high

the Saints still call him

The Orishas cry out, rumble ‘round

to find him, to guide him, to reveal

him, he, unassuming, lowly, powerful and

holy, he moves through, from tall grass to clearing

and arrives holding fortune in one hand and

healing in the other, pours assurance from his

mouth and illuminates love to the seeking

and the scorned from lips dripping in honey and humility

Oh, High John

High John come

He could’ve stayed away

but he could not leave his

people, as they entreated, danced

in clearings stump drums thumping in the night

Yea, High John

High John arrives

Golden straw crown gleaming

Making ways for his people who

have wailed, wandered, waited watched

fatigued and faltering . . . He still sees the holes to fill

that they might somehow become whole, as whole as he who has scoured

the lands and the seas

Draw near, High John

High John finds and fixes

and pulls from robes a

Conqueror’s Cure

Regina Garcia

❦ ❦ ❦

A Long Time Ago This Was a Rich Man’s Backyard

Now the trees own their dirt

This morning, a woman and her dog wear silent circles in the pavement

We struggle to make a meager living

In the meadow

I watch a spider thread gossamer between two trees

A collection of crushed paper cups in the brambles

and the spit of the ghosts who gummed them

Anyway, it’s an ant’s world now and always will be

Everyone is pregnant and sharing articles about how to parent through an apocalypse

Of course I want meaning, too

And by that I mean a child of my very own

To walk with through these trees

My child who gathers leaves and never speaks

Maybe at the end there will be no sound

Just gestures of love and violence

The grass shifting slightly to accommodate the breeze

Rebecca Valley

❦ ❦ ❦

Jenny Hubbard (Salisbury, NC) manages a used bookshop that raises money for her local public library.

Morrow Dowdle (Hillsborough, NC) hosts “Weave & Spin,” a performance and open mic series featuring marginalized voices.

Regina Garcia (Greenville, NC) has contributed poetic and vocal content to the Sacred 9 Project of Tulane University.

Rebecca Valley (Durham, NC) has written a collection of true crime stories for children which include dognapping, museum heists, and cryptozoology.

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Wind & Fire

Posted in family, Photography, poetry, tagged Bill Griffin, Bill Griffin Photography, imagery, NC Poets, poetry, Regina Garcia, The Firetalker's Daughter, Tornado on May 12, 2023| 9 Comments »

[featuring two poems by Regina Garcia]

This Fire Tastes Like . . .

This fire won’t taste like the last ones did
Singed souls torn up, crying, wandering,
wondering how to get love back
How to fix life
How to repair
The last fires tasted like . . .
Tasted like loss
Tasted like shame
Tasted like despair
Tasted like mourning
Tasted like no way out
Tasted like no way back
tasted like Tulsa
Tasted like Elaine
Tasted like Watts
Tasted like Wilmington
Tasted like old Eppes High . . .
Tasted like all that it had consumed

This fire tastes different
This fire tastes fed up
This fire has eyes set
Beyond loss
Beyond prison
Beyond death
Beyond the graves
This fire has new eyes
Fixed on that “New New”
Jerusalem
New fire gonna propel these children into
promised land
They won’t need the water fo the oppressor
Because they are children of living waters
And Raging Fires
And earth tht has promised fertility
Yet pushed out weeds to choke and distract

This fire tasted different
It tastes like energy

Tastes like righteous fury
Its fuel is dark kindling root
It will combust from a place to deep
So misunderstood
So, underestimated
That it will not be contained
This fire tastes different
It tastes like resolve

It will reject any attempts to thwart combustion
The internal combustion
It will incinerate attempts at trickery for
It has seen the video and believes
It waw murderous hubris
It saw The Dead that were tried for dying
It saw the solid stance of patronizing defiance of other fires
It saw the lies stifling acrid air
This fire tastes different
It tastes alive
It will not stop until there is nothing left that can stop it
It will then scoop the ashes and build
Jerusalem
Yeah
This fire tastes different
This fire tastes like revelation
This fire tastes like change
This fire tastes like
Hope

❦ ❦ ❦

Rainstorm, windstorm, limbs thrashing the house in panic, rain attacking the windows through the screens: we can feel Amelia’s mounting fear each time the sky grows dark and she asks, “Is this a tornado?” No, Honey, just a big storm. We don’t get tornados around here.

Until this afternoon. Severe Thunderstorm pings on the phone while we’re watching a movie with Amelia in the living room. Within minutes the sky is slate and the TV goes black. When hail peppers the porch we lurch for the basement. Amelia makes it into a game, the divine gift of the seven-year old, and while we play with flashlights we hear the drumming of rain but assume those contrabasso reverberations are thunder.

It’s all over in fifteen minutes. We climb the stairs and open the front door – our neighbor’s venerable willow oak, trunk at least two meters in diameter, is angled across the road into our driveway. Not crushing our living room. One sugar maple at the end of our house has had its spine snapped and hurled, but not into our bedroom. As our neighbors emerge, we tally and discover no one is injured (although not true of several roofs).

Everyone’s yard is full of twisted trunks and limbs or huge redclay balls of the uprooted. We notice most of the trees aligned prostrate in the same direction and we mutter, “Downburst.” “Straight-line wind.” Two days later, though, the National Weather Service makes its proclamation: an E0 tornado. We wonder if Amelia will ever want to finish that movie we had started. And if we ever get our power back on, we’re ordering some more flashlights.

❦

Regina Garcia’s new poetry collection, The Firetalker’s Daughter, is elemental – wind, earth, water, fire. She describes her mother and her son as Firetalkers – they can speak to pain and talk it into submission. And isn’t that what these poems do, speak to the pain? If words could remove the pain of the world, the inescapable pain of living, perhaps a new day would dawn when the earth would have no more need of words. We will never see that day.

But strong words, words of compassion and truth, can raise us out of the pain. We can stand on the shoulders of the poetry, the hymns, the stories of the Firetalker and see a way beyond the pain. We can see a road before us where pain can’t wield its power over us. We can live in this world of pain and still proclaim joy, the rise of indomitable spirits from the embers. Oh, Regina Garcia, may your poetry lead us there. You are the Firetalker.

❦ ❦ ❦

The Fire That Consumes: The Burnings of Black Histories

Have you ever seen fire, the kind that consumes . . . ?
a house, a block, a street?
a community?
a town?
a nation?

Have you ever stretched fingers towards fire just because you wanted to feel
the last gusts of breath before the flames melted . . . ?
Mortar from brick?
Wood from steel?
Skin from meat from sinew from bone?
Have you ever jumped at the crack and splinter before the crash?
Hid your face to escape the blowing soot?
Covered your nose to block the smell of escaping gases the incineration of
flesh? Squeezed eyes shut to restrain the release of tears?

Fire destroys completely
Everything
Except memory
Those who have lived through fire never forget that all that was lost cannot
be returned, cannot be restored
Pre-fire life flickering in memory

Have you ever known the indignity of stolen memory?
Of erasure of thought?
A disallowing of necessary history passed on from ind to mind
No collective storage
Trashed as disposable waste
Scores of nations and families of people relegated to one layer of life lived
while other layers burned away
Withdrawn from the light of day
Layers that could have lit
the illumination of minds
the awareness of conditions

the recognition of irreverence and unrighteousness
the tackling of generational traumas
the overcoming of fear
the pride of resilience

Layers of heated memory
Deemed villainous
Tossed into the ashes
By thieves, those who dread
The power that it brings
And the rise of indomitable spirits from the embers

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