https://sweetlit.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/The_Legend_of_the_Fall.mp3

The Legend of the Fall

I fell from a giant polka dot hot-air balloon up in the sky. Just as I fell from the balloon, it began to rain English Breakfast Tea. What cushioned my fall was a pile of hand-me-down clothes from my youth. They were too big for me because my older brother is a few inches taller than I am. My mother was in the garden cutting nopales for breakfast. I ran into my mother’s adobe home from childhood because I missed summertime in México. Once, when I was thirteen, my friends and I played soccer for twenty-six consecutive days, in the cerro, without sleep. At one point, we were playing in front of the International Guinness Book of World Records officials. We didn’t end up breaking the record, though. We fell just short. Short of immortality and legend. The legend of the fall.


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, Boulevard, Crazyhorse, Georgia Review, Grist Journal, Huizache, Iowa Review, Los Angeles Review, The Missouri Review, The Moth (UK), Poetry, Raleigh Review, The Southern Review, Witness Magazine, The Yale Review, and in The Best American Nonrequired Reading Anthology. He lives in Southeast Los Angeles and teaches creative writing online. He has a forthcoming full collection, “Bad Mexican, Bad American,” with Acre Books in 2024. His favorite sweet is a puerquito pan dulce con cafe. 

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