HOPPIN’ LOWRIDER HAS HIM MILE HIGH

BY KEVIN FOOTE

They tell me his momma doesn’t pick up my calls because the
cell bills are stacked high, hiding under the foldout table
tilting in the muddy field along Blosser.

They tell me his momma doesn’t pick up my calls because
the translator on the three-way call wouldn’t know the Mixtec
word for the kind of tears she weeps,

Somewhere between
He’s such a sweet boy believe me, and
All this just for fucking cheaper cilantro, and
Howling wheels appear each night,
Rolls forth a monster of oil and rubber,
Lashes out at him whenever my prayers to La Virgen
make their way from my lips,

Its red hand closer ‘gainst his eyelash curves and cerebral grooves
as he grows up, and as silence sizzles down where I cannot go,
where do I go, Profe? Where do we go from here?

They tell me he won’t bring a knife into my class again,
because the voices won’t stop but his enrollment here will
before anything makes the news.

They tell me graduation is big here, to get a good spot along
Hidden Pines as all the semis packed with cilantro bunches,
broccoli heads, hearts expectant, generational joys, fists full of
wonder, palms opened by the psalms of broken mothers’
broken dreams, will honk, as they cruise past our school.

They tell me the best lowriders in Northwest

will be bouncin’ high,

kids and mommas and a few abuelitas buckled in tight, smiles
brimming, laughter floating freely,

mixing with subwoofers and applause

and the boy for whom I can do nothing,

somewhere beyond our line of sight,
beyond these Sherwin-Williams green
and iron oxide brown fields,
these salt-washed cheeks,
these grey cement cul-de-sac circuits,
where hydraulics creak and squeak as they bounce higher and
higher and higher and…

air horns, wooden ratchets, hoots, hollers, applause.

Did the ‘84 cutlass, with the pearl blue and pink trim,
with the shimmering spinning hubcaps– that one,

yeah, the one bouncing the highest.

Did it launch him high enough?

Can he hear what we hear, a mile high?

Kevin Foote (he/him) is a writer, teacher, and explorer. He was born and raised on The Central Coast of California, but now calls Green Mountain his home. When he’s not in class with his students, he loves investigating restaurants in the Denver region, trail running, and inviting friends and followers into the writing process online and in poetry slams. Kevin’s first collection, Cabin Pressure, is a work full of the woe and wonder of teaching, the unsung moments of victory in mental health struggles, and the unabashed joy of experiencing the natural world along The Front Range. You can see his published poems and works in progress on @feastsonfoote