Poetry: Two Poems by Jose Hernandez Diaz

The Pocha with the Adelita Tattoo

I fell in love with the Pocha with the Adelita tattoo.  
She’s so cultured and idiosyncratic. Her hair is up in a bun.  

She wears heels with blue jeans. Red lipstick.  
Her tattoo is “Día de los Mueretos” and Mexican Revolutionary themed.  

Her eyes are Pocha light brown, like honey.  
I don’t know If she speaks Spanish. If she does,  

It’s probably broken, like mine. The Pocha with an Adelita tattoo  
And I go out on a date to a local taco shop. We talk about music,  

Art, and poetry. We have a few cocktails and eat tacos.  
At the end of the night, I ask her about her tattoo.  

She says she got it because it represents her Mexican heritage  
And because Las Adelitas were “badass women.”  

I tell her it’s lovely and lean in for a kiss.

The Tecolote Tattoo

I have a tattoo of a tecolote, or owl, on my forearm. Drawn inside the belly of the
tecolote is a “Día de los Mueretos” traditional skull. I got the tattoo to show my Mexican,
indigenous pride, but also because it looks really rad. The tattoo was rather painful, but
like most difficult things, worth it in the end. My Mexican mother wanted to disown
me when she first saw the ink. “Sinvergüenza! You’ve damaged your family name! Not to
mention what God thinks!” Either way, my tecolote ink means the world to me:
insomniac, sage; companion for life.

About Jose Hernandez Diaz

Jose Hernandez Diaz is a 2017 NEA Poetry Fellow. He is the author of The Fire Eater (Texas Review Press, 2020). His work appears in The American Poetry Review, Crazyhorse, Georgia Review, Huizache, Iowa Review, Pangyrus, Poetry, The Southern Review, The Yale Review, and in The Best American Nonrequired Reading Anthology 2011. He teaches creative writing online and edits for Frontier Poetry.