What You Can Count On

La Superior is a bakery on Cupples Road

Where pan dulce, tortillas, French bread mas fino

and matchmaking is dispensed.

Bet your bottom dollar.

***

La Superior – how haughty,

employing young neighborhood girls

to bag at the client’s prolonged requests -

“Dos de pan de huevo… un marranito… tres cuernos…”

***

And these girls mentally adding the cost

as the orders go on

…”Y hechale dos empanadas de camote,

my sweet potato – one for you and one for me”

***

La Superior – most exceptional.

This, the place where my parents met.

My first employer too – at $5 an hour

I’d count by fives and tens and hand out an order,

***

not skipping a beat,

- “I don’t like empanadas. Quien sigue?!”

Summer Linens

Semaphore skirt – old

thin material that always

fit just right – waving

the proclamation

of a new state of mind – bright

transparent in the sun,

I am my own.

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I haven’t been writing, so I just sort of jotted this little poem down about what I’m wearing and how I’m feeling today

I’ve been thinking more on the high rise of my life and of something else that poet Cavalieri said in the session. She said that she writes about Trenton, NJ and Italian culture because that is who she is and that is where she comes from. Some of the best poetry comes from what you know best. I find that I hardly write about my culture though it really did shape the person I am today. So I’m thinking of writing a series of poems that pertain to some of the floors in my high rise life that really show just what being me (a Latina/Chicana/Mexican American) in the West side of San Antonio was like. I haven’t dug into that part of my life poetically before. Hope it produces something of which I can truly be proud.