A man in a Chicano Batman shirt got a tattoo of the state of California on his neck. He rode his longboard to the tattoo parlor early in the morning. This was going to be his third tattoo. He also had a tattoo of palm trees on his chest and a skeleton on a surfboard on his calf. He smoked a cigarette as he arrived at the shop.
Everything went smoothly. It didn’t hurt much. He was a little worried he might be perceived as a gangster, but he knew real gangsters could tell the difference between soldiers and civilians. He rode his longboard home. The sun peeked through the fog.
The man in a Chicano Batman shirt was born in southern California. He went to college in northern California. He’d never lived anywhere else. He didn’t want to. Couldn’t imagine living in a place that didn’t have Mexican-Americans. He wasn’t arrogant about it. He just loved the sunshine and the ocean and the tacos and the murals to La Virgen de Guadalupe.
Jose Hernandez Diaz is a 2017 NEA Poetry Fellow. He is from Southern California. He is the author of The Fire Eater. His work appears in The American Poetry Review, Boulevard, The Cincinnati Review, The Georgia Review, The Iowa Review, The Nation, Poetry, and The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2011. Currently, he is an associate editor at Frontier Poetry andPalette Poetry.
