Scott Hernandez was born and raised on a small chicken ranch in southern California.
He has lived among the vanishing farms and orange groves of the Inland Empire all of his life. His recent work appears in American Poetry Review, Inlandia Readers Guide, Packing House Review, Red Wheel Barrow, Acsentos Review, and Palabra. - Home
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Friday
Nov
22
Scott Hernandez - Poetry
Scott Hernandez was born and raised on a small chicken ranch in southern California.
He has lived among the vanishing farms and orange groves of the Inland Empire all of his life. His recent work appears in American Poetry Review, Inlandia Readers Guide, Packing House Review, Red Wheel Barrow, Acsentos Review, and Palabra.
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Doves
The doves cooed and sang in her yard. She ran a sharp knife up and down both sides of the cactus pads, scraping away, spines. She diced the nopales into long thin strips, fried them with some fresh eggs and tomate. We ate outside near her fence and that large wooden cage that held her doves, they reminded her of Mexico, of being young, alone, raising my mother. My grandfather a Bracero, working in the U.S., gone for more than four years. She believed he forgot the promise to come back to her. Her birds kept her busy, their songs made her feel less lonely.
I knew she loved those birds, especially now that abuelo was gone into the grey winter sky. Sick, blood clots moving up her legs. That rest home, those Thursdays I sat next to her and rubbed her feet, she could no longer reach. She would ask me to turn up the heat on her blanket. I said I would but never did (nurse’s orders). She begged me to take her back to México. I told her I would, kissed her on the forehead, pretended to turn up the heat on her blanket. Then I left her and went to meet my girlfriend. I wondered if she thought of her doves.
(The Bracero Program (named for the Spanish term bracero, "strong-arm") was a series of laws and diplomatic agreements, initiated by an August 1942 exchange of diplomatic notes between the United States and Mexico, for the importation of temporary contract laborers from Mexico to the United States.)
Night of Smudging
Cold comes, stinging my hands, the silent trees start to drop fruit. I fill pots with motor oil and kerosene. As the darkness enters the grove, grandfather fires the pots and we rush warm air to the leaves. Most of the citrus is on the ground; we’ll be lucky to save a third. I stand vigil for nine hours; then leave the trees to fate. My grandmother closes her eyes, clutches her rosary; I kiss her forehead, head to my room— exhaustion takes me. I dream the flames and black smoke will incinerate us.