Heavy Blue Veins: Watts, 1959
Heavy blue veins streak across my mother’s legs,
Some of them bunched up into dark lumps at her ankles.
Mama periodically bleeds them to relieve the pain.
She carefully cuts the engorged veins with a razor
And drains them into a porcelain-like metal pail
Called a tina.
I’m small and all I remember are dreams of blood,
Me drowning in a red sea, blood on sheets, on the walls,
Splashing against the white pail in streams
Out of my mother’s ankle.
But they aren’t dreams.
It is Mama bleeding—into day, into night.
Bleeding a birth of memory: my mother, my blood,
By the side of the bed, me on the covers,
And her slicing into a black vein
And filling the pail into some dark, forbidding
Red nightmare, which never stops coming,
Nevers stops pouring,
This memory of Mama and blood and Watts.
Luis J. Rodriguez is an acclaimed poet, novelist, journalist, and activist. Rodriguez has penned 17 books spanning poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and children’s literature, notably the best-selling memoirs Always Running: La Vida Loca: Gang Days in L.A. (Simon & Schuster, 1994) and It Calls You Back: An Odyssey Through Love, Addiction, Revolutions, and Healing (Simon & Schuster, 2011).
His literary accolades include the Carl Sandburg Literary Award, a New York Times Notable Book recognition, a Lannan Foundation Fellowship, a Poetry Center Book Award, the PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Literary Award, and the Paterson Poetry Prize.
Rodriguez was born in El Paso, Texas, and raised in East Los Angeles. From an early age, he was immersed in gang activities and substance abuse but simultaneously played a significant role in the Chicano Movement of the 1960s and ’70s. In 1989, Rodriguez founded Tia Chucha Press, and by 2001, in collaboration with his wife Maria Trinidad Rodriguez, he initiated Tia Chucha’s Centro Cultural & Bookstore. He has also been recognized for co-establishing community initiatives such as Chicago’s Guild Complex and Rock A Mole Productions. His substantial urban peace and gang intervention endeavors helped lead to the creation of the community-based Gang Intervention Model, approved by the Los Angeles City Council in 2008, and disseminated nationally and internationally.
