The Firetalker’s Daughter by Regina Garcia

Currently in presales at Finishing Line Press! Will ship on March 31, 2023! Get ready to feel “The Fire!”

From Finishing Line Press:

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The Firetalker’s Daughter honors the power of mother’s love and tender teaching, the value of ancestral gifting and wisdom, the necessity of mourning for movement, and  the audacity to hope and act for a more just future. Spun along a motif of fire, these poems carry searing incantations that evoke an awareness of the relevance of the literal, figurative, and spiritual fires that breathe down lines and throughout time.

From NC Poet Laureate Jaki Shelton Green and Award Winning Author Kai Coggin:

Spiritual incantation and unspoken ancestral magic singed and sparked my heart, as I moved through the language and gospel of Regina YC Garcia‘s debut collection The Firetalker’s Daughter. Charting a path through her lineage of healers and those who could “talk the fire” out of burns and wounds, the gift passed over her, she burns her own powerful impressions of Black Light onto the breaking world, like an ancestor alive and witnessing. “I cannot talk the fire / Yet, I am Fire… Truth / My ancient magic renders demons cold.” Garcia takes the reader into the depths of self, motherhood, social justice cries, the erasure of Black history by the fires of an all-consuming whiteness, mourning a lost daughter in Breonna Taylor, and yet, carrying an unwavering hope in “the rise of indomitable spirits from the embers.” The seeds of generations are scattered in these blazing words, torched open. These poems— a phoenix rising from, all around us, a world of ash.

–Kai Coggin, author of Mining for Stardust, Incandescent, and Wingspan

The Firetalker’s Daughter is an offering, incantation, and invocation that taps into the power physically or metaphorically of fire. Through expressions of the inner self, Regina YC Garcia’s poems tap into the questions of reconciling fearsome nature with goodness and peacefulness as seen through this divine elemental creation.

Scorching imagery and passion create wisps of smoke. Smoldering narratives become lightning bolts and poetic kindling igniting substantive undergrowth for a brighter day. The Firetalker’s Daughterinvites the blaze that always illuminates the before time of far tomorrows.

–Jaki Shelton Green, North Carolina Poet Laureate

Book Cover Illustrated by Camryn Harrell

9/11: 20 Years

9/11: 20 years

planes like bombs blasted into buildings 

in the middle of skies 

and crumbled them down

lost lives

lost dreams 

lost securities

i stood in a library lobby 

i watched 

feet frozen to the floor

that sad 9th month

11th day

I cried endlessly 

thinking “all is lost”

planes like bombs  blasted buildings

bombs that broke us 

bombs that bonded us

for a while

for realizations 

of brittle security

eventually break 

common ties

recall empathy

call forth insanity

bring out anger or worse 

apathy

over and over 

throughout history

we are continually

watching boats, planes, storms, floods,diseases, institutions

These curious instruments 

dressed like bombs blasting into

buildings, nations, people, families, hearts

incinerating, crushing, marginalizing, colonizing

enslaving, terrorizing, irreverently ruling

in our lands, in all lands

pulling us in, tearing us apart

leaving memory of tragedy 

in one generation

the trauma of the tragedy 

in the next

collective traumatic memory 

That we carry for generations 

to come

left in people who

create people who do not know

how to choose the bonding

over the brittleness and the bitterness

who don’t know

how to make new love 

out of old loss

how to mitigate

how stop 

the cycles

of people like bombs

blasting into people

i still see this today

feet frozen to the floor 

this 9th month

this 11th day

20 years since planes like bombs

blasted into my head, bonded 

into my head

we pulled together

we pulled apart

cracked clay pots 

in my 54 years of living

my mind still holding so much

collective traumatic memory

waiting and wanting to be acknowledged

to be repurposed

to be reverently built into 

a sky of hope 

into a world of change

Removing the Madness from My Mental

Finding Peace in Pieces

If I do not know it all, I do not know it.

I am holding only a piece that is so much greater than I even know.

As he, she, it, they, I are in constant growth
and creation until their time in this realm is spent, I will never know it all
(as Breath itself creates anew around itself).

Depending on my state, I find this reality either excruciatingly binding
or extraordinarily freeing.

Sometimes there is Peace in this knowledge of not knowing.

It is not my place to know all.

All would likely end me.

Regina YC García

More perfect…

Seems to me that to not allow the histories of the people of this diverse country to come forward with the necessary narrative fervor that these histories deserve, “we the people” do ourselves deadly injustice. We deepen the wounds of traumas that yet live, view each other with increasing suspicion, drive apart, marginalize, and subjugate the value of others, and descend into a deep frozen state of animosity, ignorance, and fear.

In essence, we become the antithesis of everything this country has claimed it was trying to be-a “more perfect union”- a progressive concept, at best.

We never really got there, but there were moments; there was hope. Now these pockets of hate and ignorance-racism, sexism, xenophobia are putting down roots in the wet ground of fear, fear that calls evil “Godliness”….gods of small things, threatened by replacement, call on ancient Baals with new faces.

https://www.businessinsider.com/oklahoma-law-bans-lessons-critical-race-theory-2021-5

https://youtu.be/7R_Qk1AN5S4

Middle Torture Chamber

(Just a little light momentary pity fit, you know, “how I be” feeling sometimes, and I write, so…)

From the Middle Torture Chambers…

A middle life
Yields a muffled cry
That no one desires to attend
Few, some, around, at times
For a minute, dispassionatly, adverbally
An adjectivly weak tailspin
For no one yearns
To hear the enlightenments
Of that flattened center space
No one cares for perspectives
That the verve of exotic margins erase
For a middle life predictably draws power
That eats the zeal of the day
No middle magic weilds enough interest
To hold a captive sway
Therefore, moderately blessed
In-betweens and means may often find
That the glory that they seek
Will only torture their minds
Angst and agony painfully increase
While watching long sought dreams
Slowly, completely unwind
And peter out with a gasping wind
As life beckons the middle
Ever closer
To the end