Caroline M. Suarez Rodriguez

Arroz blanco

My mom didn’t teach me how to cook.

She didn’t say: ‘échale hasta que las ancestras digan que pares.’

She didn’t say: ‘for every cup of rice, one and a half of water.’

She didn’t teach me what ‘a ojo’ meant.

She did tell me to get a man who can pay the bills.

She did tell me to have kids because that’s your insurance.

She did tell me that ‘todos son unos cabrones,’ 

pero que ‘hay que aguantar.’

And so: I left home.

Without recipes on the palm of my hands.

But a fear so tight that it cut my circulation at night.

I didn’t want the iron ring on the ankle,

Or the baskets full of laundry and empty of dreams,

I didn’t want the mirror like a clock.

Or the babies like a life sentence.

I did want the habichuelas con recao,

El arroz sin salchicha.

El arroz con gandules. 

El asopao de plátano.

And so: I let another person’s mother teach me what my mother didn’t. 

There, sitting on the floor of a gringo library,

I learned- from an untouched cookbook- cómo se hace el arroz blanco.

Gentrified Island

I remember your hands.

They smelled of the tomatoes and the garlic we used for el sancocho.

It was late November and I thought “I might love him.”

I have read way too many books about love.

Y había caminado tanto de noche sola that I thought, I really thought,

that this was better than to be lonely.

Have you ever spent a winter in the center of the Midwest, honey?

It hurts.

It really hurts.

It breaks your face; it dries your hands.

It makes you miss home. 

And that day, I was missing home.

I remember I told you I was scared of the sea but at that moment, it was everything I wanted.

I wanted the salt.

I wanted the seashells.

I wanted the sand in my hair.

I remember your eyes absorbing the heat from my words.

I knew you could touch it: that Caribbean colony, all broken and starving.

I remember you ate it. 

I remember you eating it like the juiciest watermelon.

Until there was nothing but seeds on the floor.

I remember how the living room smelled before the explosion. 

Before the tsunami that came crashing inside of me.

That poor gentrified island full of gringos.

I never said sí.

But you didn’t ask.

You just came with your suitcase and built a house inside of me. 

An orphanage, inside of me.

You blinked twice. 

Taking every beach, every coast, putting your name on it. 

Always taking. 

I saw Cristobal Colón again, taking all the gold from my womb, before I saw you:

like a miserable God,

writing me a new life.

And when I told the story, 

years later,

the only thing the judge said was: “but you didn’t say ‘no’.”