By Mark Gonzalez

Autumn In Alaska           

As a kid, my father and I spent our autumns cruising his 1971 Avocado Green Dodge Pickup Truck down the one lane highway that connected our home to the four hundred people village we called a town. Two miles down, we’d take a left turn on a lightly paved road full of potholes that led into the forest. At one point, the potholes would overcome the highway, leaving patchworks of concrete, till eventually the road ended, the truck stops, my Father and I would walk underneath leaves turned rooftops among willow trees and pinecones- bonding like trees to bark- building this log home called family.

     What Lies Beneath Concrete?

            In LA, freeways are everywhere; children use traffic jams as alarm clocks and horns as roosters. They say highways connect us, make mobility accessible, ancestor to the Web, bringing us all together. Yet in East LA concrete meets where people are divided. The 5 intersect the 10, to the 110 to the 710 while homeless make friends under overpasses, as we pass over these slaves never allowed to leave Egypt or Pharaoh; a communion of commuters and heaven is hitting a carpool lanes at 80 miles an hours during rush hours.

Yet flashback twenty years: A door is knocked- eviction notice given, a home is bulldozed, the cement is layed over the grave, a new freeway is built. Nature turns city turns suburb is the Native American settlement- no tee pee keys to where around our necks- memories are destroyed, rubble reduced to gravel mix with water to create cement.

Excess turned into Wal-Mart Parking Lot with a Starbucks in the left corner; and left over pavements turns Earth to asphalt to basketball courts so you have more of a connection with rims, Timbs, and Jordan’s than they do the land, then we wonder why they’re used to jumping through hoops.

Throughout the Southwest the U.S. destroys Indigenous Land by separating tribes with railroads transcontinental, turned trolley.

In Palestine, Israelis mimic Manifest Destiny- annex land by building settlements than build freeways to connect them deploy soldiers to protect them, as for Visas they reject them, build a wall that began in Berlin moved to Jerusalem now ends on the border of Juarez that my grandparents crossed to reach land they once owned.

Nana, Baba, Abuelito, grandpa, elders- names like a language we forget to speak, till it no longer rolls off our tongues. Tombstones become abandoned like lots, cemeteries bought then sold, bulldozed, paved, repainted- the highway is mans way of colonizing the environment- and freeway begin in Brooklyn, now stretches through Haiti, left turn in Hebron, a stop in Constantinople and end in Nepal.

And who amongst us knows how to give directions without using a road.

What Lies Beneath Concrete

  beneath the gravel scars on our hands, the asphalt stains on our feet

     beneath the streets, the dirt- is it roses or bones, bullets or homes, family, memory, or both

We are spiritually disabled, amputees from the land, and the automobile is our SUV turned wheelchair-

yet when there is no more oil we will walk

  when the cars no longer run we will walk

 when the world runs out of road we will walk

        homoerectus, straight spine and find our way home to the land they’ve banned us from.

 When we arrive pickaxes will make potholes bigger and shovels will uncover the memories they’ve buried-

of home, heritage maize dances, depka, turquoise temples and clay windows,

underneath skin are bones; underneath concrete are homes before borders bulldozed our masjids, temples, and thrones,

Yet even occupied we survive as flower- Rebellious roses whose rage is the thorns that were born to prick those who walk on our stalks or pluck our land with their hands.

For flowers are fertilized with our ancestors skeletons, learn their names-

larkspur like Lakota, thistle, mistletoe, Shashawnee, Chimuevey, Palestinian, Haitian, Cuban, Nepalese, Bangladeshi,

Use the mountain as your tombstone, so I may climb to the summit of your soul and weep in your honor.

like in Palestine, when I stood in a refugee camp outside Jericho holding an abandoned half buried sneaker, imagining what became of the leg it belongs to.

Picturing children playing sand box, gravel road soccer 

checkpoint fire rings out, he runs, bullet hits leg, sneaker falls, limb amputated,

and only one shoe is needed if a youth has only one foot.

As settlement are built upon his refugee bones

like these suburbs are built upon my Native tombstones,

my people, paved over by progress

grave markers turned freeway signs

What lies beneath concrete-?

we do,

so tread carefully

for I’ve seen what a forest can do to a freeway

what a pothole can do car

what a people can do to a checkpoint

what God can do to a government

and you never now whose ancestors bones you may be treading upon

when tires blow out

when buildings blow up

we are the beautiful flower people you called weed

pave the world

even rose will grow through concrete

and as my father and I collected firewood under tangled tangoing branches

as the leaves change their garments from green to copper, to grey

as they fell from rooftops to floor

I would ask my father what became of all the trees when winter had covered them. He would tell me that the snow may cover the leaves for a season, yet in spring everything white turns to gold and brown then green like his Dodge 71 pickup truck, like the color of soul before it turned greed. Green like the color of the earth before there were streets.

And so shall we.

Moving like my father and I when we ran out of gas

Children when they’ve found a map

Refugees when they’ve found the key to the gate that’s barricade their roads

Finally walking

home