July 2024
Jamie Ross
jross@laplaza.org
Bio Note: During most of the year, I live, haul water, and chop wood in a remote cabin west of Taos, NM. Winters on this mesa are severe, so San Miguel has truly become my second home. My poems have appeared in many journals, including Poetry East, Nimrod, the Northwest and Paris Reviews, as well as Best New Poets 2007. And a new book, Postcards From Mexico, a collection of poems and photographs, has just been published by Sunstone Press (Santa Fe).

Ripley’s Burger House

	—La Ancha San Antonio, SMA

Rikki who is Ripley riffs in English
then in Spanish, then shifts back again:
 
certain phrases, intonations, certain
reflexes, desires, certain pleasures
  
have their accents and cuisine, how
a man can talk of food and suddenly

speak it, all its aromatic notes
and sauces, ketone tartness, soufflé,

saffron, rosemary, this language
like the whirring fan, its ancient

ungreased vibration, among the peppered 
ferns waving in the breeze, spicy

red geraniums shaking to its whiffle,
among the honks, roar and screech

of outside passing cars, a nonstop
Slovak tour group pouring
 
in the door, climbing up the steps 
from their idling ETN, taking every table 

of the terraced dining room. Because
no one waits for words. All just
 
for the waiter. And every one you greet 
is in love for the hamburger.

Rural Soldiers, Hacienda de Cristo, Morelos (1910)

	—from a photo by Hugo Brehme, 1910

It's easy to make fun of these men—on the banks 
of a stream, at the edge of a war—who've just

enlisted for Villa's cause. Their broad-brimmed

conical hats. Starched wing collars and cravats. 
Ten-button vests, double-breasted coats

under their bandoliers. As if the bullets were
 
simply ornamental, like chains of foil, silver lights
draped on a Christmas fir. Their wicker picnic baskets
 
open in the grass beneath a branching ceiba. Linen 
tablecloths, laundered napkins, bottles of wine.

And their women—scantly clothed, barefoot, 
silk shawls around the shoulders, kneeling 

in attendance like a scene from Manet. This is a war?
 
It's easy to mock them. It's easy to feel poignantly 
sorry. Here by this massive tree. Do they even

have a clue, what they've gotten into? How does
Christ feel, naked, hanging up there?

©2024 Jamie Ross
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