Moving perhaps from that to this other book, Bird Avenue.
I've been working on a series.
This new book-- this other book Bird Avenue.
I'm working on a series of something
I call my lyrical gang poems.
Gangs were a lot different when I was a kid,
before automatic weaponry.
And the drug scene, it's gotten quite serious.
But when I was a kid, the other change
was that it wasn't the boys you were afraid of.
It wasn't the boy gangs you were afraid of.
You were afraid of the girl gangs.
Because the girl gangs would get you, certainly.
And their mothers were the ones who were even worse.
The fights that would start between the girls
would get finished by their mothers then look out.
Anyway, so I've been working on this series of poems honoring
my gang of girls, these girls that I
ran with in junior high school.
Because there was a power to that.
There was a feminism to that.
There was something in that experience that's valuable
and that ought to be celebrated.
So with that in mind, I started these series of poems.
And the gang that was my gang was called
Las Gatas in Spanish, The Cats.
Gatos is usually the cats.
Gatas is a feminization of the cats
but it also has these other connotations I won't get into.
Las Gatas, in Spanish we were Las Gatas.
In English, we were The Cat because it was nine of us,
nine lives to a cat.
So we were the cat in English.
And the nine of us was Bird, I was Bird.
People always ask me about the bird imagery in my poetry.
Well, I was called Bird all the way through up
until high school.
So there was Bird, Tiny, Mousy, Grumpy, Cat
Eyes, Flaca, Sleepy, Princess, y Betty La Boop.
And I started this manuscript when I was in my Ph.D. Program.
And they had something in colleges called Women
in science, like a support group for women
in the sciences, wonderful group.
And yet there were never any Chicanas in it
because there are very few Chicanas in sciences,
in the hard sciences.
And there weren't any Chicanas in this women in science.
So I started playing around with the idea of women in science.
So I started these series of poems
playing with the names in Spanish
of the fields of science.
And so thinking about science and these girls,
this is a poem that came out.
And the field of science is astronomía.
Astronomy, astronomía.
Astro, no mía.
The heavens, the stars, aren't mine.
The heavens, not mine.
Astro, no mía.
And there's a little bit of Spanish,
and I'll translate the last line when I get to it.
"The closest we ever got to science
was the stars, like the Big Dipper
ladling hundreds of thousands of beans and diamonds
for some Greeks long ago, when Lore
was a story of chaste women set in the sky, Diana, Juno,
Pleiades, las siete hermanas, daughters, captives of Zeus.
And the children, the children changed into trees,
bears scared into stars.
We wished ourselves into that sky, held our breaths
and stopped dreaming, stopped stories, our hearts,
and escalated up into that ash trip
to heaven, seven smoked rings of escape from the chase.
Y nada, punto.
We were never stars.
Our mothers would call.
The fathers of fate, heavy like mercury,
would trash our stomachs into our wombs.
Cold, we'd roller coaster back down to the Earth,
to the night before school, before failed examinations
y el otro which is much harder to describe.
Study, sure, we studied hard.
But all I could remember was that man, Orion,
helplessly shooting his shaft into my lit house from the bow.
¿Y yo?
Hay bow.
Y ya me voy.
And me, there's a bow.
And I'm gone."