They came around like lost dogs looking for a place to rest, prickly, small, tangled on the splintered planks of oak; a summer diaspora spit from the horizon’s bleeding mouth, where they wandered up the steps of our front porch. There was no movie-bounce or wind, no cowboy, crickets, no symbolism not already known, their wobbly stride scraping the mounds of blistered dirt, because our yard was just as dry as them, shriveled stiffly like our skin. Football fields away, they’d rise and huddle into clusters, forged by the heat in just the right frame, that I’d think of them as the devil’s knuckles, still digging through the limbo he’d been buried in, while I sat buried further in this blaze, collecting all the tumbleweeds inside my head, balling them up one by one, until I built the family of snowmen again, parched replicas of my father, mother and me, all standing in the center of this scene, like mannequins out of some Manhattan project; our faces smiling at the melting sun, waiting for the mushroom cloud to blow our way.
Tumbleweeds
ESTEBAN RODRÍGUEZ is the author of eight poetry collections, most recently Lotería (Texas Review Press, 2023), and the essay collection Before the Earth Devours Us (Split/Lip Press, 2021). He is the Interviews Editor for the EcoTheo Review, Senior Book Reviews Editor for Tupelo Quarterly, and Associate Poetry Editor for AGNI. He lives with his family in south Texas.