Dear Raul Rios who lives,
After Sesshu Foster
One day I took the Metro to South Pasadena. Graffiti on the train said fuck the police so I did.
Got off on Mission and Meridian. The walls were pretty and clean like my fingernails. White
people walking around. Others asleep on the lawn of the library. Walking down Fair Oaks, the
truth is: I miss my dad, I miss Jamba Juice, I miss BlockBuster. Sugar cone waffles and I texted
Father Figure #1, said ‘i miss my dad. i miss you. in alhambra rn, thinking of you and him.’ Said
something back like ‘your father’s proud of you. here’s a big hug.’ Came up on Cal State LA, all
the Mexican kids waiting outside looking fat and bored, taking the bus home. Industrial road
now, I tag my own secret language on a lonely pole in a lonely lot covered in lonely weeds. Look
for it. Coyotes speak a language not unlike Spanish or English. Think of Weezer’s “El Scorcho”
and how half-Japanese boys are all skinnier than you. This is what language sounds like.
So close to City Terrace now, and I thought of you, the living Raul Rios. How prison can no
longer hold you. How now you whisper to power lines so every house on the block has access to
Telemundo, Univision, KTLA. How you’re shrunken and sober. I would have liked to share a
beer with you before it was too late. Sit around a tight kitchen making tamales sipping on Stella.
I’ve never had Stella. I’ve never had a dad. One day a car crashed into our telephone pole outside
the front lawn. Knocked out the power line, my sister and I couldn’t watch Disney channel no
more. My step dad’s best friend, AT&T worker, Irish, round belly, came to fix it. I wish it was
you. I wish my dad paid a brown man to fix our TV but I think you were still in prison, like all
brown men.
//
Rhiannon Cielos Chavez is a trans-masculine whitewashed Mexican from Los Angeles, California. He received a BFA in Creative Writing from Southern Oregon University, where he read his debut chapbook, Beer Hunter (Armadillo Pussy Press), at the 2023 Oregon Fringe Festival. Their work has been published in the chapbook anthology One Poem Festival: An Anthology Celebrating 20 Years of Letras Latinas 2004-2024, as well as in Jefferson Journal, Drifter Zine, Mobile Data Mag, Main Squeeze, and more. Rhiannon is the Development and Operations Assistant at Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Center.
