Death is strange, like my great-grandfather, Eligió, who died in 1932
after catching a cold when he took off his coat because an avocado
got smashed in one of his coat pockets. He died at forty years like Moses
wandering in the desert. He was the first person in Salitral to own a car,
a Ford Model T, with a crankshaft start. What if there was un cementerio,
where only people who died by fruit were buried? Here lies Rodolfo,
stabbed in a tomato dispute, who is buried next to Don Eligió,
who died due to a crushed avocado.
Steve Castro’s debut poetry collection, Blue Whale Phenomena, was published by Otis Books, 2019 (Otis College of Art and Design, Los Angeles, CA). Poetry forthcoming in Guesthouse; PALABRITAS: a Latinx literary publication (Harvard College); Hotel Amerika & Speculative Fiction for Dreamers: A Latinx Anthology (The Ohio State University Press) & has appeared in The Florida Review; DIAGRAM; Forklift, Ohio; Green Mountains Review; Water~Stone Review; etc. Maura Stanton wrote, “Steve Castro is a contemporary surrealist in the spirit of James Tate and Russell Edson and Charles Simic.” He was born in Costa Rica and settled down in Southern Indiana.
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