April 2022 Featured Artist - Jonathan Mendoza

Bio

Jonathan Mendoza is a Boston-bred, Chicago-based Jewish and Mexican-American poet, organizer, and social justice educator. He is a National Poetry Slam Champion, winner of the Sonia Sanchez – Langston Hughes Poetry Prize, and a three-time award winner at the College Union Poetry Slam Invitational. Books, updates, and more information can be found at MendozaPoetry.com and @JMendoza010 on Twitter and Instagram.

Find his latest book here: https://www.magcloud.com/browse/issue/1341257

Featured Work:

Everything Is Natural

Yes, including the oxygen you inherit currently. Of a tank or lingering. The unknown carbons breaching our noses, mouths, tubes (each natural). Coal, sewage, ash: all natural. There is lineage to everything.

Even resistance. A lung, or two—and a diaphragm—collaboration for the expulsion of iron, via cough or contraction. All organic. Intuitive. As is resistance outside the body. Propelling in an act of yearning. Perhaps, yes, even for love. It is natural to love. To gather and assemble a community of livings for a mutual preservation.

(One is not fighting on behalf of nature.
Nature fights other nature
on behalf of itself.)

Even when appendages march, stand, and occupy, the muscles tire, drowning in acid of their own concocting. Arteries flood with cortisol, kidneys overwhelm, cells wage war on each other. Even this, (I am loath to admit), is natural.

There must be a million ways to displace a life. All of them natural:

• handcuff

• cell

• beautification development

all to be shredded by once-infant hands, settling into once-infant lungs.

(Your resistance is as natural as the thing you’re resisting.
It’s okay to depose the notion of destiny.
It’s okay for the living to determine the trajectory of the living.)

Source: https://www.nrdc.org/stories/four-poets-honor-chicagos-hazel-m-johnson-mother-environmental-justice