There is Rain in the Street Today: Héctor Castañeda

April 29, 2020, Kate Belew With Héctor Castañeda (Santa Cruz, California)

What else could we ask for, hands out, discs 

of our irises dilating in reverse at the absence of filled palms

and I want to say sorry, for things I have no ability to change:

bigoted suited men sever hospitalized hands and call it divine plan.

There is rain in the street today and I want to say thank you.

Gratuitous to the muted livid atmosphere above for luminant liquid life.

And god bless the storm drains, and the leaves in the gutter for I 

have not enough hands to hold overflown oscillant oceans.

And I do not believe I would want to hold them even if I could. 

There are valiant gloved fingers, masked faces more capable than I.

And I believe in them because I am not sure what else to believe. 

I often contemplate the humanity of faces with mask-hidden smiles,

and why I hold my breath sometimes in doorways now. 

Can't fathom frontlining lungs, Atlas-bearing cities on my bending spine.

A different kind of shouldering, the wheel and the wall and the weight.

Limb sockets splitting seams to keep another body's threads intact.

And the difficult stitching, sometimes it will hold 

veins and lungs together from gaping; wounding leaving their faces ajar.

Hello, I’m Héctor Castañeda; poet, music producer, singer-songwriter, graphic designer, event curator, gardener, UCSC junior, and much more. I consider myself a jack of all trades, rooting myself in as many meaningful connections as possible. I come from San José and a proud, hard-working family of immigrants. My writing and musical themes often touch on intuition, ancestral energy, linguistics, surrealism, religion, color, organized chaos, metaphysicality, (in)harmony, philosophy, queerness, biology, marginalized bodies, the rewritten and unwritten. I’m a shapeshifting chameleon night owl bellowing into the oceanic void, constantly phoenixing the architecture of my body. For creative inquiries, please contact dogdaysaomusic@gmail.com or @dogdaysareover_hectorc.