Featured Poets: Alan Chazaro and Thea Matthews
Alan Chazaro
Alan is a San Francisco Bay Area local and Mexican American educator and writer. In 2018 he graduated with his MFA in Creative Writing from the University of San Francisco where he was a Lawrence Ferlinghetti Poetry Fellow, which is awarded to a writer “whose work embodies a concern for social justice and freedom of expression.” Previously, he attended Foothill Community College, and later UC Berkeley, where he participated in June Jordan’s Poetry for the People program. His first poetry collection, This Is Not a Frank Ocean Cover Album, was the winner of the 2018 Black River Chapbook Competition and his second, Piñata Theory, was given the 2018 Hudson Prize. They are both available with Black Lawrence Press. Currently, he’s working as an adjunct professor at the University of San Francisco. Be sure to check out the Forum blog, forumccsf.org, for an interview with Alan. He met with Forum staff for an intimate interview where we discussed anything and everything: the changing Bay Area, rap music, how he spent 9 years as a public high school teacher, what it’s like to be a writer of color, and more.
Glass Beach Burial
While Draped in a Bandana, Because Big Smoke is in the Air
Northern California is not a daydream
but a landfill, with signs saying don’t turn your back on the ocean. Since childhood, I’ve mapped the lines of these interstates like a tattoo on hands I’ve never asked for. Flipside: California is the tattoo and the ink and the hustle above unbroken bones; it is the cartilage housing eucalyptus roots in
a drought. It is the drought and it is
the fire and there are not enough
beds to be slept in but still we burn and mouth ourselves wide enough to hold
redwoods and coastlines and everything here is splitting, or has already been
split, and we are laughing
beneath this sunset. Rewind: there
are many shades of soil beneath this
surface — which are you ?
There are many you’s beneath every beachfront — which do you hold closest ? The air
is warm but we wear hoodies and ice
never haunts our songs but still
we sing. I’m saying: this is
and isn’t what we want it to be. There are orchards of unpicked ambition to harvest inside all of us. We are drawn to the curvature of this light. We all want to rest here.
Red Cloud Litany
In Richmond, a red cross is burning
at a Methodist Church. This isn’t a metaphor.
If you walk to the Point, you can see everything around here: the Bay Bridge; Mount Tamalpais;
fishermen; anchored yachts; warehouses and shipyards. What else does this countryside hold ?
Today is the shade of death. It is the apocalypse, in a literal sense. I feel the grim reaper breathing
but not whispering anything. I should be horrified; instead I grab my camera and hop the chain link fence.
I aim my shutters and click. I don’t want to forget what it felt like when we were all buried.
Thea Matthews
Thea visited City College via Zoom to read from her first book of poems, Unearth [The Flowers] (Red Light Press). Thea started her academic life at City College where she took poetry and sociology classes. Her book is about survival and it travels through the stages of grief to find healing — and flowers. One student in the audience, Katherine Wong, perfectly captured the impact of Thea’s return to her alma mater in a reflection for her English 1B class:
“This reading was such a great experience. She was so passionate about poetry and talking about her experiences. It was a little shocking that she used to be a CCSF student. She knew what she wanted to do and she seems so determined. It’s amazing to be around that kind of energy.”
Born and raised in San Francisco, California, Thea is a queer black feminist activist, poet, educator, and author. She is Afro Latinx with Black, Indigenous, Mexican blood who writes on the complexities of humanity, grief, and resiliency. She earned her BA in Sociology at UC Berkeley where she studied and taught June Jordan’s program Poetry for the People directed by Black feminist author Aya de Leon. Currently, Thea is a public health researcher and an MFA candidate for Creative Writing at New York University. She is the poetry editor for For Women Who Roar™. And she has work in the Atlanta Review, The Rumpus, The Acentos Review, Foglifter Journal, and others.
Ready to Boost I.
Definition
Boost — (v.) to steal; shoplift
The hope for a new life
or death is near
They see everything as a price tag a small bag curled up under a tongue.
Their xeric eyes are no match
for insects crawling over skin
They wish they were in
Example sentence: He’s finna boost from Safeway right now.
II. The Yearning
Their spirit is still alive despite
clouds of doubt possession of fear
the abyss of smoke glass burning
Yet the drag of breathing for another day tugs on their sleeve.
They wish they can just blow it away or flick the fly off
Even better they wish someone would just boost it.
III. The Waiting
A man depleted by failed attempts
takes a seat waits gets ready by the 16 th Street Walgreens
He has nothing left but another run in his blue jeans and he knows it as he blows out spit bubbles
Like a little anxious boy chewing on cheap gum in a defeated daze from another fight to survive
Each day begins the same awake sit boost slam repeat boost for another fentanyl fix deflect a reflection
On concrete be another missing person trapped in the city never escaping any of this
How could he not look back on days like these and wonder just wonder
Forum Literary Magazine 