High School Counselor, Twice Divorced

He’d tried them all—call girls, strung-out kids
with matted hair, streetwalkers slick
as plastic gloves, hangers-on at honkytonks
(camper in the parking lot, rock
for twenty bucks) but he liked the border whores
the best, the rum and lemon tastes, their pouts,
mariachis pounding through the night.
And afterwards, tears sometimes, the whore the mother,

he the child, Carta Blanca easing
long-held hurts. “Kind man, you like Andrecita,
sí?” And he would tell her
how his wives had turned against him, when his kids
had run away, how he tucked it all
inside as students buried him in break ups,
beatings, lost esteem. Then he would dream
her face before him, feel her lips against
his whisper, “Sí, my chula, love me, love me please!”

 

Robert Joe Stout is a graduate of Mexico City College and a longtime freelance journalist specializing in books and essays about Mexico. He’s been published in America, The Tishman Review, New Politics, Poem, Chic and many other magazines and journals.

Ira Joel Haber was born and lives in Brooklyn. He is a sculptor, painter, writer, book dealer,photographer and teacher. His work has been seen in numerous group shows bothin the USA and Europe and he has had 9 one man shows including several retrospectives of his sculpture. His work is in the collections of The Whitney Museum Of American Art, New York University, The Guggenheim Museum, The Hirshhorn Museum,The Albright-Knox Art Gallery & The Allen Memorial Art Museum. Since 2006 His paintings, drawings, photographs and collages have been published in over 230 on line and print magazines. He has received three National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, two Pollock-Krasner grants, the Adolph Gottlieb Foundation grant and, in 2010, he received a grant from Artists’ Fellowship Inc.