Bizcocho
By Juanita Rey

 

I bake
from a recipe,
not written down,
but that my eyes have seen
as a child, a teenager.

 

Into it go busy hands,
one moment immersed
in flour and water,
next adding sugar,
or stirring dough.

 

So much of the food
on my mother’s table
was a history lesson
in how the generations
that came before
prepared the food,
with the occasional
time-saving element
introduced surreptitiously
down the years.

 

I mostly eat in a rush,
fast food,
or right from the can,
or heated in the microwave.

 

But, on rare occasions,
I bake.
A cake, mostly,
and I don’t even like cake.
But how can I deny myself
the honor of being an ingredient.

 

Juanita Rey from the Dominican Republic lives in US. Her work has been published in Mixed Mag, The Mantle and Lion and Lilac.