New Mexico Mercury

Going home homeless

Going Home Homeless is a personal account of a graduate student who returns home to document the history and culture of the acequia that has sustained her village for centuries...

Insight New Mexico - NM Music Commissioner Rick Huff

This week V.B. Price talks with music commissioner Rick Huff about the often overlooked New Mexico music scene and how it's poised to make a huge revenue and culture impact if given the right support.

Elegy for Johnny Tapia

Johnny,
did you die the way you wanted to?

Did you want the mystery
to cloud your demise?
Everybody arguing
as to what finally killed you.

It was the pisto.
Nah the method.
The coca.
Or was it the pills the doctor
gave you to kill the phantoms
of chingasos,
la vida loca?

Syncretism for the twenty-first century: Some notes from Mexico

The word syncretism generally describes a blending of two disparate, often antagonistic, elements. One dominates, but sensitive observation easily unearths the other. The conquered culture remains, often in powerful ways.

Weekly Poem: Preface

Nineteen-thirty-six: I hurried as always
but was late. Eight centuries
or ten thousand years,
my small story fixed to my back.
Food came weighed and wrapped,
shelter engorged, surplus.
My own, my own, my own
was a mantra I could sing
in any season.
I could be who I was
and also anyone else...

“56 Up”—Life is for living

“56 Up,” a movie that recently played at Albuquerque’s Guild Cinema and widely available online, is the latest installment of director Michael Apted’s ambitious lifelong TV project that began in 1963. 

Some of the original participants dropped out, one left and returned 28 years later. But the others have continued, for reasons that defy even their own understanding, to allow their lives and psyches to be probed in public every seven years.

Poetry’s voice

Poetry-lovers here would have been astonished at the 9th annual Festival internacional de Poesía in Granada, Nicaragua that took place from February 17 through 24 of this year.

Weekly Poem: A day in the life of Las Cruces

The heat of Las Cruces begins
somewhere
deep in the bones underground,
out near Mt. Robledo and ends
south of the border in the desierto looking
for a
better life.

Make it disappear

El Machete

Things That Want to Be Counted

Someone on earth is counting—
night stars,
rooms in a honeycomb,
snow geese descending, wild
lilies, grain spilled from a bushel basket,
bubbles rising up from the Blue Hole.