Poem Beginning with a Fragment of Andrés Montoya by Francisco Aragón

the taco vender/reciting/darío/in a moment/of passion—
I swear it was him that night, 2012, late July . . .
We were hoofing it down Guadalupe looking

for a dive—how many were we and who? He’d hauled
his camión from Fresno to Austin, swapping one
heat for another. La princesa está triste . . . ¿Qué

tendrá la princesa? Was it you, Lety, gritando “Let’s
do Hole in the Wall, or is it the Local with that
taco truck in the back?”—I swear it was him

that night, 2012, late July . . . We were seated
around two, three mesas in the open air talking
shop: Era un aire suave, de pausados giros:

“You’re from the Mission?” “Yeah.” “¿Y eres
Nica?” “Sí.”—“¡Que cool!”. . . We were hoofing
it down Guadalupe looking for a dive—and found

carne asada, barbacoa, carnitas, al pastor

for Leticia Hernández-Linares

Francisco Aragón is the author of Glow of Our Sweat (Scapegoat Press, 2010) and Puerta del Sol (Bilingual Press, 2005). He was also the editor of The Wind Shifts: New Latino Poetry (University of Arizona Press, 2007).  He is currently completing his third book, After Rubén. Recent work has appeared in Wandering Song: Central American Writing in the United States (Tía Chucha Press, 2017). He is a Faculty Fellow at the University of Notre Dame’s Institute for Latino Studies, where he directs Letras Latinas.