Entre gotas de color y sueños de esperanza, Cada sonrisa y mano extendida, Entre cada amanecer y atardecer, Así es cada uno de ellos, entre sus similitudes y multiculturalidad.
Community Portrait
Sabrina has been experimenting with old-fashioned camera techniques, including these double exposures which superimpose neighbor and neighborhood.
Humans of _______
We are all “humans of” somewhere, but what does it mean to call ourselves human? My favorite answer is that we are angels who . . . excrete. We are not literally angels, but we are like angels—spiritual beings with tremendous capacities for insight, communication, beauty, beneath only the divine in our elegant complexity.
At A Distance
At a distance Everything makes sense The sky is up The earth is down The ocean looks like solid ground From afar Nothing stirs the heart The world is big The creatures small What difference could a person make at all?
Walk Down Sinclair
There is an RV parked on Sinclair Drive, where the road curves in front of a vacant youth center and a middle school, where the sky seems to swoop its blue, swirling wing over the distant foothills. The vehicle, stationed beneath the leafy ropes of a eucalyptus tree, is at once both peculiar and unassuming, with its jutting forehead, densely packed belongings, the metal head of a Texas long-horn hanging from the front grate. And around it the undisturbed aura of a slumbering, ancient beast. On my afternoon walks during the pandemic, taken when the walls of the house began to feel particularly oppressive, I would pace leftwards from my residence, past the blind corner, down the sunny, quiet road.
Making a Place
A feast is laid on the table today, greeting, filling us after long hours, no—years on a way. Where we’ve come from, where we’ve been. Places set around what’s been begun. You call us around. You crouch quite a ways
down to show us how washing feet lowers and lifts up what the law says. Then breaking bitter herbs and grain’s sown sweetness, for days when I groan
Between Los Angeles and Heaven
My son, he’s three, and He wants to go home. To see his teachers, he says. He is speaking, now slowly—I want to go to A-fri-ka—as if we aren’t getting it. To Uganda, he says, eyes insistent, pointing to the sky we will fly across to get back there. He is pointing to where home is, the way some kids point to the sky when asked: Where is heaven?
Intersections & Contradictions
The pieces in this issue of The Mural explore the contradictions and intersections of our lives. Cities are places where everything bumps into and piles onto everything else—places of wild contradictions and dramatic intersections. We’re all hoping to resolve them as positively as Cesar Chavez did. We hope these works help you in that direction.
In the living room
In the living room the balcony door yawns open And evening coolness sweeps in The kid downstairs is smoking again like an acolyte swinging a censer Thick incense fills the room encircling me Suddenly I am aware of holiness in this place In a moment my eyes can see What always was, only gently hidden Love and Presence fill this block hover over it
Numepith Sipiy (Sucker River)
If you come in the summer, I'll show you the river where I was baptized. I'll lead you down paths I've walked so many years. We can dance with the fireflies. In the fall, we can watch the sun set, surrounded by shimmering waters, and trees whose leaves have changed color.
A Psalm of Lament with My Asian American Sisters and Brothers
O God, my God, why… are Asian Americans treated as perpetual foreigners no matter how long we’ve been here, blamed and shunned like a distasteful disease, and our hurts unheard? As disposable erasable aliens – our women as sexual objects, our men as inarticulate eunuchs, our elderly like trash to be pushed aside on the street?
images of h o m e
hunched over the cinder block, we coax out the baby possum,
orphaned and delicate. in a towel we wrap her, set her next to a
mother in the form of a hot water bottle. when
early the next morning we find her gone, we
My Home Is My Self
My home’s physical presence on my block expresses my commitment and connection to the people of this place, my rootedness here. I invite them into my home, into my self, because I want my identity to include them. This issue of The Mural centers on this theme. Home and hospitality stretch from personal to national in these pieces.
Beauty
Beauty is subjective. Beauty is something new in the normalized. Beauty is something in the less prioritized.
at the middle school track
hot afternoon sky & the track is two frowns or two smiles glued in a quarter mile oval across the dry grass, crunchy lipped
Beauty Will Save The World
“Beauty will save the world.” A mural like “La América Tropical” shows how this can be true, how beauty can be world-saving, or at least world-blessing.