on the outskirts of Mazatlan, everybody
looked skyward because they'd never seen
the insides of a Toyota before.
We learned how many taco-stand dinners
a travelers check might buy, with beer
to lubricate the hours of another night
spent in an exotic country we'd always
longed to visit. We learned new ways
to find a telephone that worked,
to reach 800 miles across the border
and touch a man who spoke
Toyota. We paid the last of our pesos,
our travelers checks and all our gracias
to finally cross that border and get
as far as fast as we could away
from that vacation.