FLORICANTO ISSUE Carmen Giménez Smith   HAVE YOU MADE ANYTHING have you made .......anything good with your outrage built a bridge .......into it .......or is it merely .......an illusion .......an all-purpose effort against absolutes .......will an underclass’s hunger .......qualify .......for unqualified credentials or will .......you .......have to track down that .......legitimacy .......for yourself .......can I guarantee to you .......it is worth your while .......a reportage of the moment .......or is that fraught with the 70s fraught with .......the density .......of distasteful .......narrative .......is that the hitch aesthetically .......thus ethically .......does it seem .......insurmountable the desire for such validation .......or could .......you break free .......and record be .......recorder Carmen Giménez Smith is the author of a memoir, Bring Down the Little Birds (University of Arizona, 2010), three poetry collections—Goodbye, Flicker (University of Massachusetts, 2012), The City She Was (Center for Literary Publishing, 2011) and Odalisque in Pieces (University of Arizona, 2009)—and three poetry chapbooks—Reason's Monster (Dusie Kollectiv, 2011), Can We Talk Here (Belladonna Books, 2011) and Glitch (Dusie Kollectiv, 2009). She has also co-edited a fiction anthology, My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me (Penguin, 2010). She is the recipient of a 2011 American Book Award, the 2011 Juniper Prize for Poetry, and a 2011-2012 fellowship in creative nonfiction from the Howard Foundation. Formerly a Teaching-Writing Fellow at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, she now teaches in the creative writing programs at New Mexico State University and Ashland University, while serving as the editor-in-chief of the literary journal Puerto del Sol and the publisher of Noemi Press. She lives with her husband, the writer Evan Lavender-Smith, and their two children in Las Cruces, NM.   Published in Volume 13, Number 1, Winter 2012.