THE SMALL-TOWN MAN
Floydada, Texas
The first memory of my abuelo
rests on the lip of a Budweiser.
With a Mexican gameshow
on the T.V. he gave me a sip
and my throat kicked it back up.
His mustache laughed. The sting
like metal left out in a Texas
sun. These summers I spent
with my father’s parents. Days
I’d flint through flea markets,
lose money at the local festivals,
road trip to the nearest town
for groceries, play in unfenced
dirt yards, and find myself
turning their tornado shelter
into a dungeon. Rocks became
goblins. Wood beams set
to cement a new driveway
transformed into an Olympic
Arena for a balance beam
performance—I fell
into terror. Two hands
tore me away. These hands
belonged to my Abuelo
left me on the cracked curb
aware that this little house
on E. Tennessee Street
was his—built by the same
two hands. The were
the same ones that reached
for the tortilla stack at breakfast,
unlocked the gate to his junkyard,
dragged chains across the yard,
changed the channel or turned
the music up on la radio. His hands
drove eighteen-wheelers full
of a season’s harvest, waited
by the curb of the house
for Abuela to bring his lunch
out, the night of his shift. One night
he took us along with those hands
steady under a cotton plump
moon. Him, A small-town man,
he’d say; who didn’t want more
than the work he could bear.
DFW to LAX
As I feel the wheels let go,
the lady behind me speaks
to her daughter—her voice
like the grind of a molcajete—
like my abuela’s. Both
fluent in Spanglish with a dash
of long ‘Ah’ sounds in understanding.
Texas stretches beneath us
the way I rolled dough into Texas-
shaped tortillas with my child-
sized hands. Papas y huevos
in the air and a pile of toasted
tortillas. One spoonful of breakfast
could fit in my state-shaped
tortillas but she always let me make them,
pack them for Abuelo’s lunch. Abuelo
always working at the junkyard.
Migrant to his bones he’d travel across
Texas while she stayed in one place.
She never climbed into the belly
of a plane. No desire to—the woman
quiets and the ground has become
stitches of color, farmland
and roads harder to outline. It blurs
together, and I wonder if I can see
Floydada from up here or if we
even fly near the town—where I know
Abuelo sits at the table alone—where
Abuela will never see how close
I lean to the window—trying to find her.
Amanda Galvan Huynh has received scholarships/fellowships from The MacDowell Colony, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and Sundress Academy for the Arts. She was a winner of a 2016 AWP Intro Journal Project Award and a finalist for the 2015 Gloria Anzaldúa Poetry Prize. Her work can be found in the following journals: RHINO Poetry, Muzzle Magazine, Tahoma Literary Review, Silk Road Review, The Boiler Journal, and others.
theboilerjournal.com 