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  • Writer's pictureMiguel Machado

La Casa de Mamá, 1974

She has gone into flight,

flickering about the pre-dawn half light

of the kitchen,


grinding the coffee beans,

so recently pulled from the earth,

into fine mahogany ash,


clanging about the bruised

pots and pans, a blush

burning her fingers and cheeks.


Beyond the open door, heavy rain

keeps the overripe heat

from rising off patchy grass and


broad shoulders split a sliver

of heather horizon, sheathed by

a t-shirt stained with earth and sweat.


He stamps wet clods from his boots

at the threshold. She pads over naked floors,

coffee lapping at the rim of his cup.


Their fingers graze in exchange, her eyes

taking in the crack of his smile through

brambles of black beard.


His, combing the juvenile curves

budding beneath thin white linen,

a faint eclipse tracing her nipples,


the flare of hem around the port

of her hips. He is paid to till the

ramshackle finca that swallows


la casa de mamá. To break the gaunt

stallions that shit as they graze by nesting

his brow on theirs, a soft bolero playing


on his sun-cracked lips. He does the same to her

in the stable, lifting her white linen,

the kicks and neighs of the horses dressing the thrusts and moans


as night dresses the deed, taking the whole of her body

and splitting it into the places he can fit,

the things she did not know he could do to it.


Her legs tremble on the walk back and

she wonders if the lack of equilibrium twisting

the frontier between heaven and home


is what drunk is. If her mother will smell him on her.

If she now smells of the ocean he crossed.

Of English language books and the studio apartment on 103rd street,


where the rent costs more than la casa de mamá.

If he will leave phases of black and blue moons on her arms,

like those that dot his, when he leaves back across the Atlantic.


If it will hurt less the next day

or the day after that or...


the next day she has gone into flight,

flitting about the pre-dawn half-light

of the kitchen,


grinding coffee beans,

so recently pulled from the earth

into mahogany ash,


clanging about the bruised

pots and pans, a blush

burning her fingers and cheeks.

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