Wednesday, July 21, 2010

Hace frio at Grandma's

Seventh grade.
Rice and bean soup.
Vests with turtlenecks.
Neutrals, forest green and burgundy.
Grandma watching her novellas.
Me doing math homework in that impossibly small dining area.
Windows with thin curtains.
Yellow and white flowered.
"Come, come!"
Eat, eat.
Waiting for daddy to pull up in the strawberry red truck.
The color I insisted on.
I never felt like I knew her.
I never felt like she knew me.
Even as I sat in the next room.
"Bitch! Estupida! Aye dios mio!"
"Shit, man."
She is so short.
The house cluttered but immaculate.
I stare too long at the trinkets in the bathroom upstairs.
The room across the hall has a blood red bed in it.
A doll on top wears a blood red dress.
A small bed.
I imagine my father and my two uncles sharing it.
Why is there so much carpet in the bathroom?
So plush.
Soap shells and marbelized mirrors.
Teeth in a jar in the medicine cabinet.
I just prayed the toilet would never overflow.
I would hug it and then run before I ever saw the water rise.
(2006)

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