They are a circle,

they hold things up. They serve you plates. Voices flood over from the kitchen, their cackling, their teasing, the way they love you and ask everything of you. Spoons hitting dishes made in a different country. There is a grandness to these women, there is grandeur there amidst the corn dough and slick mopped floor. Strands hair-sprayed stiff against your modernity. Everything you don’t know is there, in that pot, in that freezer. One day we canned tomatoes for ten hours, steam everywhere, fingers without feeling. The gurgling of water boiling. And then we sat, me helping them learn new English words or laying store ads out across the kitchen table, like a war room, for Day After Thanksgiving sales. Plans made. Strategy. Tactics passed on and roles assigned. The swoosh of a match lit as my mother leans over a tired candle sitting next to the coffee, wax on Formica. A holy stub discarded by our church after a new one rises on Easter. This on days I have final exams or they find out someone has cancer. These women pray in the round. When they sit, they sit, and continue to yell out orders we will follow forever. Words are tossed, worn and warm, stories started in the middle of nowhere. Children run around outside. The clink of the newest woman washing dishes. Everything by hand. And it is Sunday.

OLIVIA MUÑOZ

Olivia Muñoz is the author of the chapbook, These Women Carry Purses Full of Knives, winner of the Latin American Poetry prize from the Blue Mountain Review. Her work appears in the San Pedro River Review, Thimble Literary Magazine, La Raíz Magazine, and other publications. Born and raised in Saginaw, Michigan, she now calls the West Coast home.