ISSUE 10 FEATURE

the old man who gets a kick out of watching me walk the desert
Fernando A. Flores

something about a girl with a houston accent
that takes me back to the time I’d
walk the desert after every mardi gras
and hold hands with lions and jackals
strapped to live avocado green grenades
I’d see alcoholics anonymous meetings take place
guerrilla surgeries performed rafts included
preachers of mad religions preaching calculus
underground railroads paved in white ash
the desert like a sea of glass bottles caps
blistering my feet hallucinating boredom
imagining flags of imaginary countries
out for the bounty or bootlegged liquor
the sand like powder like snow like glitter
coming upon a cross street in the town george west
pouring rain taking a shortcut around beeville
the magenta cascade of another spring resolution
seeing you dancing now I understand I’ll never forget
the yellow of your eyes and yellow of hair
yellow of waning courage of a waning distant earth
we’ve lived before where by the shore awaits
the old man sharpening his spears and his knives
grinning a chrome grin with bullethole laughter
asking me why I even bother with what I do
to forget the fish are biting less and less
and more toxic every day/ a bad bet to digest
there’s nothing to say and the old man knows
what wild horses running along beaches mean
on the winter solstice like dead silence after perfume
like cardboard souls equipped with wings
after terrorism tribunals and trash can bombs
people with nothing better to do than blow shit up
the old man laughs and it’s a bridge awaiting fate
like the wheat field in the drought and unemployed okies
sitting far away from any war going on drinking forties
smoking pall malls and jacking off to versace models
with their own sitcoms where they wait tables
never read horatio alger or john donne and dare
it be said that norman mailer has never moved me.

Fernando A. Flores was born in Reynosa, Tamaulipas, Mexico and is the author of Death to the Bullshit Artists of South Texas: Vol. 1 (CCLaP). He is the recipient of a 2014 literary award from the Alfredo Cisneros del Moral Foundation and a Pushcart Prize nomination.