“When I am at a backyard party with my friends, listening to Chicano music, and I see all these brown faces, young and old, spiritual euphoria permeates my being.  My life becomes a celebration in honor of my people.  They are a people who have suffered and worked and endured; whose stubborn reverence and love for life we call ‘corazon’.  Perhaps that is why I write, to pay homage to my people and their ways.”

            -Jimmy Santiago Baca




Road to Santa Fe
(one of my favorite paintings)
by Sandy Vaillancourt
http://sandyvaillancourt.com/
© C.C. Brooks

DISCADA

Blood rare T-bone steak

The way we like it
A third to my dog Georgia
Reminding of her ancestors
How they killed because they were hungry
How we kill as stupid cows
Follow cows off a cliff
When lightning strikes fear into our hearts
Levying it on theirs as they suffer
Except on Sundays
When they gather by ancient rivers
Beneath cottonwood skirts
Arched over fire and smoke
Turning cheap flank steak into something better
Much better
Than this ten-dollar T-bone

 *discada is a method of cooking in northern Mexico using a modified steel disk from a farm plow inverted over a wood fire. 

OKC
© C.C. Brooks

 

“History.  This is the word that is always bleeding.  You don’t think this until your country changes and when it thunders you search your own body for a missing hand or leg." 

                 -from the poem “History” by Linda Hogan

The Powerhouse Bar
OKC
© C.C. Brooks

 

“From darkness, from my bed, lightning opening the night.  The world was green one moment, with cottonwoods leafed out.  But darkness is a full thing, another country.”

                 -from the poem “Lightning” by Linda Hogan

Wheatfield
© C.C. Brooks