By Lita Kurth

Señor Jorge rolls his garbage can on wheels
trolley of mops, push-brooms, garbage bags, and dustpans
down the concrete aisle past classrooms, bathrooms, staffroom

He un-jackknifes the lunch tables 
raises them up again
hangs nylon fabric above 
to keep off seagulls, pigeons, sparrows 
and the too-hot sun

Kindergarteners call out, “Hola, Señor Jorge!”
They call the teachers by their last names
custodians by first
A Maestra of the second grade
hugs him in the parking lot.

“Don’t get me wrong. I love my life,” Señor Jorge says.
“But sometimes I just wonder
what it’s like to write a book.”

His family, cousins, parents live in Mexico, 
a mountain village
“We never had a church to go to,” says his wife.
“The nearest one was twenty miles away. 
But we believe.”

Everyone he meets he asks for books 
especially books in Spanish
After he locks the school for summer 
he piles them high inside his car 
drives the California highway Alta, Baja, South

Past the gleaming canal: coastal mansions, 
almond groves, bodegas, taquerias
longhorned cattle till at last 

Señor Jorge parks
at a one-room building,
ten by twelve, concrete blocks: a library
which now has a roof and windows  
and, on the door, his names
both first and last

~~~~~

Lita Kurth, MFA- Rainier Writers Workshop (PLU) is the author of One Creative Writing Prompt a Day: a journal to build... (Callisto Press) and has received multiple Pushcart and Best of the Net nominations for fiction and creative nonfiction. She has taught creative writing at De Anza College and elsewhere to students aged 8 to 80, from jail residents to published writers. She co-founded San Jose’s Flash Fiction Forum and won the Diana Woods Memorial Award from Lunchticket. A featured reader for Peninsula Literary Society, Play on Words, Poetry Center San Jose, and others, she has performed twice at Poets N' Film for the Cinequest Film Festival. Sample publications: The Millions, Atticus Review, Lunchticket, Brain,Child, Main Street Rag, Cherry Tree, Wordrunner, Oyedrum, Chicago Literati, Rappahannock Review, NewVerseNews, elllipsis...Verbatim, Unlost Journal, Raven Chronicles, defenestration. More information: https://litakurth.substack.com/