El Fayuquero




El Fayuquero


A Mexican picker heading south
In his overloaded truck and trailer
Mattresses and tricycles
Microwaves and kitchen tables
Check off the list a car battery
Couches and jumper cables

Un Fayuquero heading home
Back to his shop
Across the southwest he roams
Picking at every stop
Scavenging American junk piles
Shopping at the thrift stores
Combing the swap meet aisles
Fighting the picker wars
In all the little desert towns
Blasting winds and dusty roads
Enduring the ugly frowns
As he secures his unsteady loads

Con cuidado, doing 55 on the freeway
Bikes teetering on top of chairs
Packed pickups towing other pickups
Packed to the gills with household wares

Flower adorned crosses stand out
In the trucks one flickering headlight
But the man knows without a doubt…
He’ll be in Nogales by midnight
Unlike his amigo Miguel Antonio Pedregon-Baray
A fellow fayuquero whose cross is nearby
His wreck left goods scattered all over the roadway
As he drove faster than his angels could fly

Ahora, the highway patrol scrutinizes
Mexican plates with a focused eye
84 kilometers to go
The saguaros are slowly ticking by
Their arms pointing south
Ocotillos spears with bright orange tips
Seem to light the dusky sky
Kilometer 36… the transmission slips
The tranny has run dry

The highway patrol is 5KM behind
The picker was shielded by a truck
The officer paid him no mind
Sometimes a picker needs a little luck
But the white and green truck is ahead
Border Patrol units form a gauntlet
Night vision goggles peer from the hillside
There’s a truck filled with what?
Toys… Lamps… Tools… Guns?
But there are no firearms
Just everything else under the sun

The truck is hitching, sputtering
But incredibly… not stopping
Barely creeping along
Spewing night vision obscuring smoke
As it rounds a curve and crawls up a hill
Surrounded in an eerie cloak

The truck has slipped out of sight
With its load of utensils, TV’s, and toilets
No use to radio ahead or track it from space
The gap-toothed Mexican picker and his truck
Have disappeared without a trace

Jesse Alberson
8/25/2013



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