Lauren Espinoza

[luminous]

underneath their desks children lie face up on the floor singing caballito blanco, llévame de 
aquí. outside their classroom window, machine gun cartridges empty in reynosa, mexico.
faces of children, this is all i know of luminous.

I'm quite attached a wooden, smiling red devil man that I brought home from Mexico. He sits, as marionettes often do, on my bookshelf - his legs hanging off the edge.

Lauren Espinoza's poetry has appeared in an anthology selected by Naomi Shihab Nye entitled Time You Let Me In: 25 Poets Under 25, in print at The Mas Tequila Review, online at The Acentos Review and Whole Beast Rag, and she has poems forthcoming in Raspa and NewBorder: Contemporary Voices from the Texas/Mexico Border published by Texas A&M Press.  She is the workshop assistant for CantoMundo, a Teaching Artist with Badgerdog, and currently a graduate student in the M.F.A. Program in Poetry at Arizona State University.