The Olympiad

Abstract

The Olympiad Ben V. Olguín (bio) This is that crumbling red brick buildingwhere commodities were sold in shoutsnot so long ago people still remember the soundof fortunes being made on a fistful of cottonpulled from life by dark and dirty field hands. This is where we fight for the right to eat;the wet wooden stairwell winding us upto a second floor gallows, gutted nowbut for water-stained fight postersof so many men who look alikebecause they all have the same violent father. And the ring: four ceiling postsstrung with hairy hemp rope that can cuta crooked smile across a man's backif he dares stop swinging. The Olympiad,corner of Congress and Main Street in downtown Houston, where Darryl Brumleytold the world he would one day be champonly to be shot in the gut a few days later.He should have known betterthan to walk around here at night. This is that crumbling red brick buildingwhere carloads of brown boys, black boys andmen the color of bruises cue up, anxiousto pick and pull at each otherin hope of escaping the welfare line, even though some suspect this is where it begins.The Olympiad; its long line of dark bodies swinging,limbs twitching to get started, yetsecretly hoping someday, someonewill tear this thing down. [End Page 477] Ben V. Olguín Ben V. OlguíN, Associate Professor of literature and creative writing at the University of Texas in San Antonio, was born and raised in Houston, Texas. He has published in such periodicals as Borderlands and North American Review, and, with Omar Váquez Barbosa, he translated Cantos de Adolescencia/Songs of Youth. The University of Texas Press will publish Olguín's La Pinta: Chicana and Chicano Prisoner Cultural Politics in 2009. Copyright © 2008 Charles H. Rowell