Roadside

Esteban Rodríguez

Mexico rises into view like a textbook description of a dead civilization;
its silhouette piercing the scaled soil, the streaks of afternoon mirages,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 mimicsthe effects of age, how it wears the fragmented skyline with corrosion,
subtracts layers of durability off a building’s frame; how the city mirrorsthe black-and-white photos of abandoned war zones; how a fence can lose
its purpose, become symbolic, while the river below it bleeds a historyof unsuccessful bodies no one ever claims. Before we cross over, graze
the peripheries 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 strapped in serapes to their mothers’ chests—we weave, like we do every weekend, through rows of shoulder-high water       fountains,
pattern-painted pots, and ceramic 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 rims, note the way my mother does the same.She doesn’t pull back though, doesn’t squeal or flinch, her endurance for pain
callused on her hands like the callused face of the old woman on a lawn chairbeneath a tarp, where they begin to make small-talk in their muffled
Mexican tongues. Behind them sits the woman’s Chevy, whitewashedand windowless, its bed stacked with the inventory she didn’t take down,
and I recall those playground jokes about how in spite of the small spacethey have, Mexicans can fit anything inside a car; a punchline that whether I       find
funny or not, I imagine she’ll embody when she towers her ceramics back       insideher 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 And as they exchange a few nodslike outdated currency, I watch the old woman’s hand reach out and touch
our shadows the way old women touch everything that isn’t theirs, feelingthe indifference with which we slip between her grip, how the sunlight cracks
our skin like pottery as it breaks.

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Esteban Rodríguez holds an M.F.A. from the University of Texas Pan-American and his poetry has appeared in The American Literary Review, The Los Angeles Review, Nashville Review, Sugar House Review, and Chicago Quarterly Review. He lives in Austin, Texas.

The Florida Review

Volume 41 Number 2 2017

Orlando, Florida

University of Central Florida

Editor & Director
Lisa Roney

Managing Editor
Leah Washburn

Poetry Editor
Kenneth Hart

The Florida Review is published twice yearly by the University of Central Florida. Our artistic mission is to publish the best poetry, prose, and graphic narrative produced by the world’s most exciting emerging and established writers and artists.

We are not Florida-exclusive, though we acknowledge having a jungle mentality and a preference for grit, and we have provided and continue to offer a home for many Florida writers. We have been in more or less continuous semi-annual print publication since 1975 and have recently (2017) added a new literary supplement in Aquifer: The Florida Review Online, which will feature new literary works on a weekly basis, as well as author interviews, book reviews, and digital storytelling.

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