BIO
Alan Chazaro is a public high school teacher pursuing his MFA in Writing at the University of San Francisco. He is the current Lawrence Ferlinghetti Fellow and a graduate of June Jordan's Poetry for the People program at UC Berkeley. Recently, his work received an AWP Intro Journals award and appears or is forthcoming in Huizache, The Cortland Review, Borderlands, Iron Horse Review, Juked, and others.
Abuelo’s Example
At 75
he still dances
and
flirts with women
half
his age, hulks
around
el centro with a fist
half-cocked
as if
he could knock the teeth
down
another man’s throat.
He
can barely hobble
but
captains a Ford Bronco
across
unmarked freeway lanes
in
Xalapa, flipping
off
drivers who tell him
to
get the fuck off the road.
A
firebreather, he once stopped
mid-traffic
and caned himself
out
of the driver’s seat
to
confront a teen
who
was honking
from
behind. That’s abuelo. Darker
than
the other side
of a
summer day. He never
learned
English, refused
to
visit us in the U.S. Hasn’t
crossed
any borders, didn’t want to,
so porque
chingada
would he
do it now?