Open Range

is a tight little island, a prairie zephyr, a hoax, an average western type, is a pile of rope, pig-iron, coke, softwood, hardwood, bran & jam-stained fingers right in the time-spot, ticks in the fur.

I haven’t left my front yard for a week. / Chinook winds thawed just enough to be treacherous. / Now the smell of halibut melts and curly fries plea through / Celsius and Fahrenheit’s renewed agreement.

Sergio Troncoso’s newest collection of short stories revolves around themes that are central to the life of someone raised on the border: pilgrimage, intermarriage, separation from one’s culture, time and the self. Yet what we realize, after reading A Peculiar Kind of Immigrant’s Son, is that it’s impossible to restrict border-life experiences to just a few tropes.

The Ogallala Aquifer sits deep below eight states spanning from South Dakota all the way to the Texas South Plains. An underground lake bedded down in sheets of sand, silt, clay, and gravel, it is ancient, and like all ancient things, it will disappear sooner than we would like.

Home is anywhere I’ve taken the time to notice. Where there is no “I.” It shouldn’t be called a sense of place, but a flat-out, intimate sensorium where Emerson’s dictum suddenly makes sense: “I am nothing. I see all.”

Cows bawl and mill around outside the corral. Inside the pen, calves cluster in a corner, bawling, too. I’m astride my grulla mare, Savanna.