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Blood on the Wheel

     Ezekiel saw the wheel,
     way up in the middle of the air.
               TRADITIONAL GOSPEL SONG

Blood on the night soil man en route to the country prison
Blood on the sullen chair, the one that holds you with its pleasure

Blood inside the quartz, the beauty watch, the eye of the guard
Blood on the slope of names & the tattoos hidden

Blood on the Virgin, behind the veils,
Behind—in the moon angel's gold oracle hair

                    What blood is this, is it the blood of the worker rat?
                    Is it the blood of the clone governor, the city maid?
                    Why does it course in s's & z's?

Blood on the couch, made for viewing automobiles & face cream
Blood on the pin, this one going through you without any pain

Blood on the screen, the green torso queen of slavering hearts
Blood on the grandmother's wish, her tawdry stick of Texas

Blood on the daughter's breast who sews roses
Blood on the father, does anyone remember him, bluish?

                    Blood from a kitchen fresco, in thick amber strokes
                    Blood from the baby's right ear, from his ochre nose
                    What blood is this?

Blood on the fender, in the sender's shoe, in his liquor sack
Blood on the street, call it Milagro Boulevard, Mercy Lanes #9
Blood on the alien, in the alligator jacket teen boy Juan

                    There is blood, there, he says
                    Blood here too, down here, she says
                    Only blood, the Blood Mother sings

Blood driving miniature American queens stamped into rage
Blood driving rappers in Mercedes blackened & whitened in news
Blood driving the snare-eyed professor searching for her panties
Blood driving the championship husband bent in Extreme Unction

                   Blood of the orphan weasel in heat, the Calvinist farmer in wheat
                   Blood of the lettuce rebellion on the rise, the cannery worker's prize

Blood of the painted donkey forced into prostitute zebra,
Blood of the Tijuana tourist finally awake & forced into pimp sleep again

It is blood time, Sir Terminator says,
It is blood time, Sir Simpson winks,
It is blood time, Sir McVeigh weighs.

                   Her nuclear blood watch soaked, will it dry?
                   His whitish blood ring smoked, will it foam?
                   My groin blood leather roped, will it marry?
                   My wife's peasant blood spoked, will it ride again?

Blood in the tin, in the coffee bean, in the maquila oración
Blood in the language, in the wise text of the market sausage
Blood in the border web, the penal colony shed, in the bilingual yard

                    Crow blood blues perched on nothingness again
                    fly over my field, yellow-green & opal
                    Dog blood crawl & swish through my sheets

Who will eat this speckled corn?
Who shall be born on this Wednesday war bed?

Blood in the acid theater, again, in the box office smash hit
Blood in the Corvette tank, in the crack talk crank below

Blood boat Navy blood glove Army ventricle Marines
in the cookie sex jar, camouflaged rape whalers
Roam & rumble, investigate my Mexican hoodlum blood

                    Tiny blood behind my Cuban ear, wine colored & hushed
                    Tiny blood in the death row tool, in the middle-aged corset
                    Tiny blood sampler, tiny blood, you hush up again, so tiny

Blood in the Groove Shopping Center,
In blue Appalachia river, in Detroit harness spleen

Blood in the Groove Virus machine,
In low ocean tide, in Iowa soy bean

Blood in the Groove Lynch mob orchestra,
South of Herzegovina, south, I said

Blood marching for the Immigration Patrol, prized & arrogant
Blood spawning in the dawn break of African Blood Tribes, grimacing
& multiple—multiple, I said

Blood on the Macho Hat, the one used for proper genuflections
Blood on the faithful knee, the one readied for erotic negation
Blood on the willing nerve terminal, the one open for suicide

Blood at the age of seventeen
Blood at the age of one, dumped in a Greyhound bus

Blood mute & autistic & cauterized & smuggled Mayan
& burned in border smelter tar

                    Could this be yours? Could this item belong to you?
                    Could this ticket be what you ordered, could it?

          Blood on the wheel, blood on the reel
          Bronze dead gold & diamond deep. Blood be fast.
Juan Felipe Herrera, "Blood on the Wheel" from Border-crosser with a Lamborghini Dream. Copyright © 1999 by Juan Felipe Herrera.  Reprinted by permission of University of Arizona Press.
Source: Border-crosser with a Lamborghini Dream (University of Arizona Press, 1999)

Writing Ideas

  1. Herrera’s poem employs anaphora to create both a range of moods—from anger to despair—and arguments. Choose a single word or phrase and use it as the beginning of each line in a poem that also ranges widely. Read Rebecca Hazelton's article on anaphora and complete some of the suggested writing exercises. Also see Walt Whitman’s “I Sing the Body Electric” and Joanna Klink's “Some Feel Rain” for more examples of anaphora. 
  2. “Blood on the Wheel” is packed with images of urban and semi-urban landscapes, and often includes “real” place names: “Milagro Boulevard, Mercy Lanes #9,” “the Groove Shopping Center,” the “Macho Hat.” Begin collecting the names of businesses, streets, housing developments, and perhaps phrases from billboards or advertisements. Try writing a poem that evokes, praises, or indicts your hometown or area through a catalog of such names.
  3. Choose one image from “Blood on the Wheel” that you find interesting, evocative, or strange, and use it as the title for a new poem. Try writing a series of poems based on images from the poem.

Discussion Questions

  1. As Stephen Burt points out in his poem guide for this poem, Herrera’s poem often strays from syntactic sense; that is, his lines frequently don’t follow grammatical rules. Using different colored pens or markers, chart the grammar of Herrera’s poem by underlining: where do full sentences occur? When is a line a fragment? Do you notice a pattern developing? What effects do lines gain by being full or fragments?
  2. Though anaphora is the most obvious rhetorical device here, “Blood on the Wheel” also includes other kinds of rhetorical choices, including rhetorical questions and epistrophe (repetition of the same words at the end of successive lines) and mesostrophe (repetition in the middle of lines). Using the copy of the poem you’ve already colored coded for full sentences or fragments, try marking the different rhetorical devices. How does the poem depend on both kinds of choices, rhetorical and grammatical? Try re-writing Herrera’s poem: make fragments into full sentences, change rhetorical questions into statements, and get rid of repetition. What is the effect of the poem now? How has the effect changed (if you feel it has) and why?
  3. To what extent is “Blood on the Wheel” a political poem? What kind of statement does it seem to be making? Can you identify specific images or word choices that lead you to understand this poem as “political”?

Teaching Tips

  1. As Stephen Burt notes, Herrera draws on traditions of surrealism and specifically the surrealist image. Use “Blood on the Wheel” to develop a mini-lesson on surrealist images and surrealist image making. Other texts you might introduce include selections from Aime Cesaire’s Notebook of a Return to the Native Land; “Liberty” by Paul Eluard; and “Under the Poplars” by Cesar Vallejo, among others. Discuss the tension at work between terms in a surrealist image and perhaps prepare sections from Andre Breton’s The Surrealist Manifesto for the class to read aloud. Then have the class write a collaborative poem. Writing a few base words (similar to “blood” in Herrera’s piece) on the board, have each student write their chosen base word on an index card. Then have them pass the card to the person next to them. This person provides the first “term” of the image. Have the students pass the index card again. The next person finishes the image. Go around the room and have students read the poem aloud.
  2. To what extent does Herrera’s poem feel or sound like a protest poem? Use “Blood on the Wheel” to discuss the role of protest in poetry and poetry in protest. Try generating a debate about how “political” Herrera’s poem is by using evidence from the poem itself (this activity can build on the discussion question posed above). Then ask students to research individual political or protest poems, preparing a short presentation in which they discuss the specific conflict, movement, or political question the poem was written in response to; the poet’s history in relation to the political questions her poem poses; and any effect the poem had. Example poems might include Adrienne Rich’s “Yom Kippur 1984”; “Harlem” by Langston Hughes; “A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London” by Dylan Thomas; Wilfred Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum Est”; and Nikki Finney’s “The Afterbirth, 1931.”
  3. Herrera’s poem is full of the rhythms, cadences, and rhetorical devices that have become popular in slam and performance poetry. Use “Blood on the Wheel” to have students prepare a class slam. In groups, ask them to discuss and practice Herrera’s poem aloud, paying particular attention to rhythm, inflection, rhyme, and tempo. One group might act as judges and spend this time preparing the categories on which they will evaluate their classmates. Each group should then perform the poem, taking turns so that each person in the group reads aloud at least once.
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