Fresno: Ars Poetica
1 Minute Read Time
On-ramps braided together the way a turnbuckle twists and the sky was catching fire. Papa was a man of 15-to-20 phrases off the clock—he wouldn’t talk if talking seemed rehearsed. There were 20-to-30 imperatives on the road. “Play the drinking beer song,” “Take care of your jeans, mijo.” Things of that nature. I couldn’t tell you what led me to speak. Maybe it was too early for the radio and I didn’t like silence yet. But I asked him: “Why do you do what you do?” And he laid his life so bare that I still want to clothe him. The grape strikes he’d picketed, the marriage papers he’d clipped, the salsa lessons he’d forgotten. All of it. “I gotta be on the ground, mijo.” Then he turned to me, his left hand on the wheel and the right a finger gun, with a new imperative: “I don’t care what you do, just don’t let me catch you in the fields.” The sun was lemon enough from the windshield, I put it in my mouth.
Read more from Issue 23.1.
