Abuelita

There was never a television in her house.
Just an old radio that ran off a battery.
She was always averse to plugging things in.

La sala was lined with photographs in descending order,
from her stern mother and father, to one of her wedding day,
down to my sister and myself.
With every generation, the smiles grew wider,
though, as her stories told it, 
the happiness from first to last was unvarying.

She read little, only left the house to shop, or see old sick friends,
engaged in an on-going dispute with the woman next door
though it’d been years since her garden-chomping goat died.
 
When I visited, her conversation was much as it had been last time,
as if such a small mix of doings and opinions, repeated endlessly,
was all that needed knowing of a life.
 
If she hugged me tight enough, I’d believe it.

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Juanita Rey is a Dominican poet who has been in the USA five years. Her work has been published in Pennsylvania English, Opiate Journal, Petrichor Machine and Porter Gulch Review.

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