I found watercress in a disgusting drainage ditch

and took it home to eat and sell to the Yonemoto’s farm market.

Women wearing dresses bought it happily. Diamonds in the desert.

Also there were bullfrogs in dark crevices of the ditch,

huge and vocal. Monsters in the mud.

The frog voices were a zombie film soundtrack.

After dark, big boys demonstrated gigging:

spooky and gory, with a flashlight.

I remember the twinkling, glowing-orange frog eyes.

Then we ripped the legs off and fried them up.

Ate the legs with red chili tomato sauce and licked our chops.

I now think about the legless remains, which we threw into the dark.

Horror is part of our carnivorous diet.

We got psychic energy from those springy legs.

Maybe the watercress somehow made this positive.

Bullfrog eats mouse (youtube)

Bullfrogs.com

Along the Rio Grande floodplain the Core of Engineers dug drainage ditches to make land available for farming and house sites.  This concentrated the floodplain waters, destroying wetland habitats and forming narrow disgusting channels which were typically fetid but permanently wet. There were always birds and other creatures there, so we went to see what we could find. Being aspiring machos, we harvested it, however brutal and disgusting.