"Justino"
By Ryan Brown
It took him forty-eight years
to become a dishwasher
at Pita Jungle.
Nine bucks an hour,
thirty-some hours a week,
sweat pouring off his brow
to mask the exhaustion of a face
that is no longer concerned with fairness.
He is here, everyday,
fingers to the grindstone,
tougher than the forgotten beef jerky
in some badass rebel biker's
leather jacket pocket.
He is the Zen master,
the rush without the hurry,
too grateful for what he has
and for that,
he does not blend in there,
but this is one of his high points.
Justino does the dirty work
in a restaurant that expects
wine glasses to sparkle
like they haven't been whored out
to fifty colors of lipstick
in the last two weeks alone.
When you can't speak English
or read in any language
but the blue, green,
and orange tongues of dish soap,
it is difficult to embellish
your minimal education on a job application,
where only a name and previous work experience
sweat off the page,
as if about to be interrogated
by bitter men in blue uniforms.
"Quiero trabajar."
"Quiero estar contento"
and in Arizona there is a chance,
there are truckloads of wasted food,
and it is far easier to feed a backbone
whose vertebrae have the weight of
an entire family hanging on
for survival.
This is one of his high points,
and at five-foot-five
Justino still reaches like a summit.
He was raised ten sniper-scope
magnifications away from an America
that will cross the ocean
armed and blindfolded
to siphon a stranger's oil,
but won't speak patiently
with the next door neighbors about
changes that need to happen
on our shared soil.
His existence isn't waist-deep
in politics anymore;
this is all too human for puppet shows now.
It all happened in a cluster of struggle
before he could choose the outcome of the story
through a ballot box,
so he wrote it with the distance
between two constitutions,
determined as the sun
to run circles around us.
He exercises patience everyday,
arms unwinding only after 10 p.m.,
thousands of miles and light years from childhood,
the Sahara breathing sand
on each country's land,
but we aren't supposed to know
we have this much in common.
The invisible particles of a hundred wasted dinners
cling to his skin like the smog smothering
both Downtown Phoenix and Mexico City.
His fists are iron
and have been crushing minutes
into nickels since he was 9 years old.
He is 48 going on 60
going on "what-did-all-these-years-evaporate-into?"
like he ever had a choice,
like he wasn't born into making things easier
for people who never had it hard.
The grindstone always looks like a rolling highway
when you've got your face pressed against it,
and 50 years from now,
his skin will be so
wrinkled and rough and wise,
it won't even be real.
Some Americans are still compelled
to resist a society where different nationalities
are forced to cooperate peacefully.
They hate the idea so much,
that sometimes,
they even write an email about it,
or a bill.
But his time is too precious for the bias
of blue comfort and hungry fear.
He wants only to give a piece
of this world to his family,
and in a place where people
would rather have the world
handed to them,
he does one hell
of a job.
Ryan Brown is a poet's poet in every sense of the word. The mountain town of Flagstaff is known for a poetry slam scene where poets come together as a community, and Brown was at the center of the growth as the FlagSlam Poetry Slam's slammaster from 2008 to 2012.
Brown attended four National Poetry Slam competitions as a member of the FlagSlam team in 2008, 2009, 2010 and 2012, getting as far as the semi-finals round in 2009. At the helm of Flagstaff's slam scene, Brown brought in featured poets such as Andrea Gibson and Gypsee Yo to help reinvigorate the poetry community in a town still bursting with poetic flavor a decade late.
An English major at Northern Arizona University, Brown collaborated often with poets such as Frank O'Brien, John Cartier and Sedona's Jessica Guadarrama and Christopher Fox Graham. He writes with the future in mind, his poems often revolving around the intimacy of human relationships.
After graduating with an English degree from NAU in 2012, Brown taught English in South Korea. He now lives in Nashville, Tenn.
