Poem by Staff Writer Viviana Mendoza
she is natural disaster. she is the aid in the aftermath.
she held us between her fingertips just tight
enough to know what suffocation could feel like
but not what it actually was.
that furious woman,
stomping around,
silently pleading for more space,
still cooks for my father
even when she’s mad;
still stands at the stove,
spoon in her hand,
waiting to stir the rice,
and i’d like to think that i am nothing like her.
but after our last argument,
after words fell to the ground
like undone grains of rice stuck to her spoon,
we couldn’t look each other in the eyes.
for i am too ungrateful,
i don’t care enough,
and i never apologize.
instead,
i go to the kitchen
and cook both of us dinner.
Viviana Mendoza is a high-school English teacher & a person who writes poetry. She's been published in Motif, The Sagebrush Review, and The Acentos Review. Her words always find their way to paper right before bed... when she should most definitely be asleep.
Photo by Justine Camacho.