Nestor Silva, Poet

Nestor Silva is an M.F.A. candidate at Long Beach State, a voracious reader, a fan of jazz, blues, classical and salsa music, and a devout hedonist. Various and sundry authors, from Blake and Hesse to Locklin and Kesey, have and continue to influence him. Currently unemployed, Nestor bides his time until his graduation in May 2004 by half-heartedly job-seeking and by playing the lottery. He has an upcoming publication in Pearl magazine and his first chapbook, _Always Too Much, Never Enough_,was published in 2004 by Doom-ah books. Critics, admirers, potential employers, or anyone interested in purchasing a copy of the book can contact Nestor.

Snowball Effect

In 84, while riding my yellow E.T. bike, pretending I was pedaling towards

the moon, I passed our apartment driveway. A green 83 Datsun hatchback skidded

to a stop, tapped my right leg with the bumper. I ate shit. Bleeding from my knee,

I jumped back on the bike, and rode off fast because I thought I'd scratched the car.

In 85, while playing by our apartment courtyard pool, I fell in, almost

drowned and spent the night in Harbor General where a nurse stole my chocolate

cake.

In 89, fifth grade, while the other kids talked about chasing sheep at a petting

zoo, I sat reading Orwell's Animal Farm, saying to myself, 'I'm not like you people.'

In 92, on a Wednesday, two cops wearing big black boots came to my house at five in the morning and took my dad away. That day, I went to school and learned

about the law of habeas corpus.

In 96, after a party, I was in a 92 Ford Explorer used as cover by two cholos

having a gunfight. The windows were shot out and I kept a shard of glass for luck.

In 99 at a Halloween party, the hostess wore a black catsuit and called herself

a pussy, while passing out drinks and purring 'trick-or-treat.' I drank like a stray cat at

a dairy, drove home going ninety down Western Ave. While trying to turn onto a two-

lane street, my car jumped the curb. I mumbled, 'Oh shit,' and rocketed towards a

brown house. Only the car got hurt and the black cat picked me up before the cops

came.

New Year's Eve, 2000, I was in rural Colombia at a veterinary clinic/ disco and

asked a girl for a cigarette. Her boyfriend pulled a switchblade.

While crossing the street I look at cars thinking, ‘Fuck it. Run me over.’

High Noon at Lido
Mobile Home Park

Desperados in faded black jeans, three dusty

bums from the park across the street stroll

past my place. They carry tall cans of king cobra
to drink with the dowager two trailers down

who collects cans for a living. Old Parker

from across the way, sick with tremors and

consumption, sits smoking packs of cigarettes

on his porch,waiting for the postman to show up.

My neighbor yells at her eight-year-old son,
'Goddammit Jacob, go take a shower cochino.'

It's a vulture's scream that echoes above the

mobile homesteads of lido park where I live

and refuse to mow my lawn. It's become chaparral,
a prairie, parts of dying, dead. Like Old Parker,
I wait for stampeding buffalo, a shootout, anything
to make the picture grandiose, to make the music
swell, like at the end of a western movie when the

iris closes on the hero riding into the sunset.

I am the Terrorist

Who makes you scared?
A turban'd guy that lives on
a mountain ten thousand miles away?
Young black guys staring at you
while they sit at the bus stop
and you sit in your shiny car,
just wash 'n waxed?
Might your house burn down
while you're buying a burger tomorrow?
What if your neighbor keeps a frozen
head, with one eye missing, next to the
ice cubes he put in your lemonade?
What if it's not lemonade?
Remember school shootings?
Someone walks with a machine gun
into your math class, scared you'll
see what's in the teacher's head
written in red all over the blackboard?
What about the big one: earthquake,
tornado, flood, runaway rabid elephant
that's coming soon?
The blue volkswagen beetle parked in
front of toys 'r us could have red blue
black green wires and kilos of dynamite
as passengers, right?
Don't planes seem to fly lower lately?
Block international borders,
buy a flag, blow up the bad guys' bunker
don't back off until you kill the terrorist
who makes you scared, don't wonder
why you're like that or why he likes
you that way.

Black Birds

In the park, lying in the grass like a lost black glove,
a crow can't fly. Wings ajar and legs atrophied,
dying, it breathes belaboredly. I sit next to it
and the sun looks down on us like a vulture.


An old couple shuffles by slowly with clasped
hands like claws. They give each other pecks
with craned necks like vultures. The merry-go-round
in the sandbox spins. Children shriek doing circles


like vultures. A cross-eyed girl sits with her
boyfriend but looks at me, I think, like a
vulture. And the wind moves like a vulture's
shadow at night, unseen over the grass. And the


dying crow for a second is proud and ugly like
a vulture. It takes a deep breath that ends in quivers
of bleak brown eyes and purple-black breast
feathers. A wing twitches. A claw clutches air
and watching the dead crow in the grass, I look
like a vulture.

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