El Paso Dream

By Gary English

Juarez tethers me like a balero
with a bridge instead of string. I tread
Stanton’s crammed path
over the near-waterless Rio Grande.
I could have walked its dehydrated bed.

Tanned leather’s weathered smell
infuses the mercado’s air. Piñatas,
penuche. Day of the Dead disguises,
candles coupled like an afterlife
marriage, entice tourists to a tienda.
Street vendors
make mariachi marionetas
dance — ¡baila, baila! —
like I’ll never be able. Still
I hand over my pesos. I possess
a tangle of string, wooden legs, tiny
guitar. I’ll figure it out when I get home
… quizás.

I stop at a corner for Negra Modelo, risky
time for beer: La Linea y Los Aztecas,
Los Mexicles y Artistas Asesinos —
and a hundred more gangs whose names
I can’t remember — own the Juarez nights.
I’m a gabacho; I must leave. Windless
and weak, I pant on my bicycle up Scenic
past the painted white “A” on the Franklin
Mountains. Gabriel is with me, Sylvia and Arturo,
Melchor y Timo — but we never come here
together.

Now images rapid like a cartel’s AR-15s:
Sun Bowl, Sunland Park, Fort
Bliss, Chamizal, Texas Western wins it all 
in ’66. Nunchucks and knives
in the halls of Austin High. San Jacinto Plaza,
alligators in central pond.
     (No one knows why gators in a desert town.)
Menudo written on a wall in letters four feet tall.
     No need. I can smell it four blocks back.
My garden of prickly pears, yuccas, barrel
cactus and pampa grass.

I know it’s a dream
     like I know the El Paso
     I knew is lost
     in desert dust:

A winding tumbleweed      thrown
     by West Texas wind. Still
     jumbled.      Still
     gone

This story originally appeared in Stonecoast Review Issue 18.

Photo by Ivan Calderon.