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roadside
esteban rodríguez
mexico rises into view like a textbook description of a dead civilization;
the caliche billowing across the windshield as my mother pulls into a roadside
stand. still a few miles away, and i already see how poverty 4
the effects of age, how it wears the fragmented skyline with 5,
subtracts layers of 6 off a building’s frame; how the city mirrors
the black-and-white photos of abandoned war zones; how a fence can lose
its purpose, become 7, while the river below it bleeds a history
of unsuccessful bodies no one ever claims. before we cross over, graze
the 8 of those who haven’t tried their hand at an exodus—
the barefooted boys selling chiclets, the old and toothless women seated
on the bridge, the sleeping infants 9 in serapes to their mothers’ chests—
we weave, like we do every weekend, through rows of shoulder-high water
fountains,
pattern-painted pots, and 10 statues of aztec gods ready for someone’s
yard,
each a variation of mud-brown and red, and as hot as stove-grates when i run
my fingertips along their 11, note the way my mother does the same.
callused on her hands like the callused face of the old woman on a lawn chair
beneath a tarp, where they begin to make small-talk in their 14
mexican tongues. behind them sits the woman’s chevy, 15
and windowless, its bed stacked with the 16 she didn’t take down,
and i recall those playground jokes about how in spite of the small space
they have, mexicans can fit anything inside a car; a 17 that whether i
find
inside
her truck, aware that even as my mother scans the worn-out price tags
of each pot, we aren’t going to buy a thing. and as they exchange a few nods
like 20 currency, i watch the old woman’s hand reach out and touch
our shadows the way old women touch everything that isn’t theirs, feeling
the 21 with which we slip between her grip, how the sunlight cracks
our skin like 22 as it breaks.
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