Skip to main content

Luis Cuauhtémoc Berriozábal

37

After Jose Hernandez Diaz

Jose, you have opened my eyes,
with the poem about Nick, the
quick, Van Exel. Why didn’t I ever
think about writing a poem about
that team I rooted for since my youth?
Why not a poem about Eddie Jones,
who was smooth and steady player?
His number should have been hanging
in the rafters, if not for Kobe Bryant
joining the team. I would have loved to
wear an Eddie Jones or a Nick Van Exel
jersey, but I could not afford either.
I watched those games on Channel 9
with Chick and Stu announcing. I could
understand why Nick Van Exel was your
favorite player. Come to think about it,
he was my favorite player too. Drafted
37th, such a steal. He played with a chip
on his shoulder for being dissed. He made
his share of buzzer beaters to the cheers
of the crowd. This poem is for you, Jose,
for Nick, the quick, and for smooth Eddie.
In this arena we practice our crossover,
three-point shots, and behind the back passes.
Sometimes the mustard falls off the hot dog
but we keep trying. Someday a kid will be
wearing a jersey with a poet’s name in the back.


Born in Mexico, Luis lives in the San Gabriel Valley in California and works in the mental health field in Los Angeles. He is the author of Make the Water Laugh, (Rogue Wolf Press, 2021), and Make the Light Mine, (Kendra Steiner Editions, 2016). His poetry has appeared in Blue Collar Review, Escape Into Life, Live Nude Poems, Mad Swirl, Triggerfish Critical Review, and Unlikely Stories.


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

David Oliver Cranmer

Not Just Another Playlist Often, I sit in my swivel chair looking out the window, while jazz, country, or rock music plays. This pleasure goes on for many hours a mystic trance of sorts streaming—the glue maintaining my soul. I turn the best songs into playlists (once we called them mix tapes) puzzling over the perfect order. Does Satchmo’s “What a Wonderful World” kick off my latest list or make it the big soulful closer? And does “Mack the Knife” go higher in the set than “Summertime?” That’s an Ella Fitzgerald duet! “Foolishness? No, it’s not” whether you are climbing a tree to count all the leaves or tapping to beats. These are the joys that bring inner peace and balance (to a cold universe) lifting spirits skyward. David Oliver Cranmer ’s poems, short stories, articles, and essays have appeared in publications such as Punk Noir Magazine , The Five-Two: Crime Poetry Weekly , Needle: A Magazine of Noir , LitReactor , Macmillan’s Criminal Element , and

Corey Mesler

  I think of you tonight, my Beats I think of you tonight, my Beats, and I am grateful.  I walked the narrow lanes of Academia and never felt at home. There were men and women in the flowerbeds, their heads full of theorems and poems. There were teachers who could lift their own weight in prose.  I was lonely. I was too loose.  I was a lad from the faraway country of Smarting. But I had you as so many before me. I had you and I knew secret things. I could count on you like a percussion. And now I want to say: I love you.  If not for you, what? I want to say. If Allen Ginsberg did not exist it would be necessary to invent him.  COREY MESLER has been published in numerous anthologies and journals including Poetry, Gargoyle, Five Points, Good Poems American Places, and New Stories from the South . He has published over 25 books of fiction and poetry. His newest novel, The Diminishment of Charlie Cain , is from Livingston Press. He also wrote the screenplay for We Go On , which won The Me

Amy Holman

My mother made herself the deer with a broken leg  We saw a deer through the pane into someone else’s yard. The leg moved like a tube sock pinned to the hip  and half filled with sticks. I did not like to see it suffer, either. She was upset —my mother —that no one helped  the doe. Was it a mother, too? As if we were the first to observe the scene. We weren’t. All had been told to let her be. My mother had suffered a destruction  of the self, a divorce, and no one cared. That wasn’t true.  We were grown, on our own. I agree it was hard. Yet  in those moments of a cold November day, we watched  a doe, disabled and enduring, walk across a yard and eat  a hedge. I wish she could have seen it like that. Amy Holman is the author of the collection, Wrens Fly Through This Opened Window (Somondoco Press, 2010) and four chapbooks, including the prizewinning Wait for Me, I’m Gone (Dream Horse Press, 2005). Recent poems have been in or accepted by Blueline,