As the sequin-sombrero’d mariachis, gaudy flower-smothered floats, and assorted high school marching bands slowly crawled along on Houston Street, my parents and I watched Fiesta from the fourth floor of the furniture store where my dad worked. A perfect birds-eye view on a perfectly scorching San Antonio Saturday. While the grown-ups drank their Lone Star, Pearl, and Jax beer and chain-smoked, we kids drank ice-cold Grapettes and Dr. Peppers as we whooped and crunched our Fritos and Cheetos. I remember that we flung bunches of cascarones* and multicolored streamers from the windows as King Antonio passed by below on his tacky gold-painted throne. I guess this was April or May of 1956. Early the following year, a skinny guy with a toupée named Jimmy Creech or something like that, came down from the Dallas headquarters to take over the store as the new general manager—my father was fired shortly thereafter, no doubt for being Jewish.

cumulonimbus—
the rain on my parade 
never-ending 

*Brightly colored hollowed-out eggshells filled with confetti traditionally thrown at various Mexican celebrations like Fiesta.

Mark Meyer

has been a visual artist for almost forever, and describes himself this way: “ex-scientist/ quasi-artist/ semi-poet/ pseudo-guitarist/ meta-misanthrope.” He lives in his head in the middle of Lake Washington and loves dogs, guitars, the moon, Japan, ales, and sundry other diversions. Now in his seventies, he was a neurobiologist in a prior lifetime long ago—and still really misses looking through microscopes.

Meyer’s short-form poetry has been widely published, and he is the author of two collections of selected poetry and artwork published by 3dotstudio: Old Flames & Burned Bridges (2023) and neo-Nothyngge (2020).

Meyer’s artwork is represented by Davidson Galleries in Seattle and is held in multiple collections. His paintings, drawings, and digital prints continue his interest in pattern-driven compositions, richly detailed, leaving almost no space unaddressed. As he says, “...there are no big plans or schemes in my work ... it’s simply enough to find out where these individual small ‘experiments’ lead me.” Inspired by scientific, societal, psychological, and theological considerations, his artworks reflect the complex and frenetic condition of our contemporary culture.

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡Texas Requiem, haibun in MacQueen’s Quinterly aka MacQ (Issue 20, September 2023)

⚡More than a dozen of Meyer’s haiga and poems appear in MacQ; see Index of Contributors for the list.