Austin Downtown Arts

May-June 2002
Volume 8 Number 4

... arose.
poetry by Ricardo Acevedo

Drone Hummer fiction by Alejandro Aguirre
His attempt to woo women by buying drinks makes him feel and look like a lecher. It finally dawns on him that this is the kind of bar his daughter might frequent with her girl friends.

Flat Coffee poetry by Mercedes A. Villamán

Have You Heard Us? by Cèsar Diaz
Over the past three years, the Latin Rock Showcase at SXSW has become the place to be for rock aficionados of any description, and its success begs a very important question: Why doesn't Austin have a viable Latin Alternative music scene?

To Live in Teotihuacán poetry by Erika González

Not Your Average Bookstore by Evan Johnson
Resistencia does not just sell books. If it did, it would probably not be in business anymore.

Notes from the Woodshed by Paul Klemperer
In art we anthropomorphize things like death and evil into quaint fictions resulting in literature like The Devil and Daniel Webster or music like "The Devil Went Down To Georgia." However, we also create fictions like money and the 7-day week, things that have objectively altered our reality through the organization of time, labor and technology.

cover art by Ricardo Acevedo

Reeling by Jodie Keeling
Willie Varela had no job, no girlfriend and no direction. Until, one day,with the money he'd earned from taking a job with the 1971 government census (the first one to recognize Hispanics as an ethnic group), he purchased his first Vivitar Super 8 camera. He would put all his pain and uncertainty onto film. Willie Varela had finally found a reason for living.

Section Eight by Daniel Davis Clayton
I thought I saw through the psychodrama-producing, mental self-image trauma inducing, internal bleeding karma-deducing theories of inferiorities of Negro minorities.

Up All Night by Harold McMillan
When people ask how long I've been growing my locks, it seems my automatic answer has been "about ten years." But it's been about 10 years for the last few years.

Verities by Ricardo Acevedo
On rare nights, I would be left on my grandfather's doorstep with a brown paper bag suitcase under my arm. I'd wander round back to the patches of green grass lawn, to the old oak tree stump, to the overgrown xylosma bushes with zinnias and little gold butterflies swarming around, to a small paint battered Victorian and to the decaying shack -- mi "Papa's" shack. This, in my memory, was the universe.