where are all the Mexicans who aren’t going to heaven?

tell them to bring their Dickies & their slides & their rosary beads & all their heartbreak & all their primos y primas y primxs. tell them to leave their flags & bring a six pack or something to throw on the grill.

all the sad Mexicans are at work making us proud. they’re washing dishes or driving trucks cross country or talking shit at a construction site. (what about the Mexicans who work as police officers?) (fuck those Mexicans.)

apologies to all of the sad Mexicans i know and all of the sad Mexicans i’ve been. but i can’t write another poem where we show up to work at the steel mill for 20 years straight with no days off just to get laid off on a Wednesday by a man with more mustache than face.

this one is for my homie Josefo who never plays a song made after 1988. tell that foo Javier he can come, but if he gets kicked out of the bar, he’s on his own. tell Danny he’s not allowed to talk about capitalism for 24 hours. even my mom is playing flip cup and taking shots. tell god they’re invited, but only if they drop the self-righteousness. we get it already. you brought us into this world & whatever homie. we hired a taquero for the next few hours & i promise his tacos de asada are the best tacos south of Sibley Blvd. if you don’t know where Sibley is, tell Nate & Eve to give you their tour of the south side beginning with Cal City.

Taron hit my line and told me all the Cal City homies are tired of reading poems where we get our homes foreclosed. Taron said, tell them about the night we drank Incredible Hulks in a basement bar in Hammond & danced & sweated until the sun cussed us out.

i keep writing poems that begin with the wilting.

that live in the wilting.

erasing the bloom.

this one is for the day we survived. this is for the darkness we turned into a dancefloor. this is for all the sadness we carried & the homies that helped us carry it. the carrying only gets heavier. therefore: the law of physics requires us to love more. celebrate louder.

you know the joke about Mexicans crying? (what’s that?)

how do you know when a Mexican is about to cry? (how?)

when they crack a joke. (haha.)