Allison, Voluntaria del Cuerpo del Paz
by A. Diao Lavina
Tea steeps in a cracked cup.
Her hands sift rice under a slow tap, grains clinging
to that skin now with new scars from paper,
from onions and knife in an unmapped kitchen
where once she woke thinking of good bread, home
a simple turn of her head.
Eyes clasped, breath closed, she shakes her head,
fills from the kettle her emptied cup.
Lately her dreams have wandered close to home,
rain and moldy light to gray tree trunks clinging,
the childhood photographs in her mother's kitchen,
under her father's lonely script the studious, unlined paper.
She writes letters on onionskin paper,
language swarming new in her head,
plucks words out of air in the sullen kitchen.
She owns a rucksack, a Walkman, space, a flawed cup.
She owns memories nestling in darkened corners, clinging
eclipses, echoes daily drifting toward home.
The same stars host the sky back home,
she writes to her grandmother, whose skin like parched paper
tells stories of things slowly dying and time clinging
like little deaths in moments strumming low in her head.
Morning pours fresh tears into each their cup.
Yearning punctuates every evening in each their kitchen.
Late November she thinks how people will flock to her mother's kitchen
to taste their childhoods, their morsels of home.
Thank You for Thy daily bread, runneth over this cup.
She thinks of leaves crackling like crisp red paper.
The thoughts make a home in her head,
like shy children to her skirts clinging.
She finds we journey far to find ourselves clinging
to who we are. We become the myths in a stranger's kitchen
unfolding sackcloth woven in looms hidden in the head.
A man's laugh, the smell of bread, a woman's walk, tug us home
to which we send pieces of ourselves tucked in paper
for familiar hands in bluing dawn to gently cup.
Living each day becomes a matter of clinging to the wanting place, toward home,
in the lonely kitchen where clarity of silence and word carved forms on paper,
where meaning steeps in the head and inquiry fills a cracked cup.