Tonight's Poet Corner: Making Dinner

Making Dinner
by Belinda Roddie

Mama has a scar on her chin
about the length of a cemetery -
every mole and wart's a tombstone
signifying each year of her life. She
is a goddess, but she is aging like
a mortal in the Mexican desert,
the hot winds whittling away
at her youth.

She stirs rice and beans in a pot,
and when the steam hits her face, she
almost looks sixteen again. A fiesta
in her childhood backyard, her father
serving handmade enchiladas at a white
plastic picnic table. A unicorn piñata lies

half-mangled in the grass. One of its
paper eyes is missing from its severed
head. Mama tells me that story all
the time, about how my little tío shrieked
in terror at the sight, and had
to be taken to his room. Her arm pops
and cracks with each swivel
of her wooden spoon.

I am standing at the kitchen table,
halfway done with setting down
the silverware, when I count the
permanent runes on my own skin. One scar
is from falling off my motorcycle, chasing
my little cousin after he stole cigarettes
from an angry storekeeper. Another is

from burning myself on the grill
while making sloppy tacos at my second
job. Each cut and gash that lingers
on my hands seem to define an hour,
a day, a month, all of it disappearing
behind the gray hills surrounding
our gray house.

At the stove, I hear the hiss of spilled water,
cooling on the linoleum, and our dog laps
it up and then wants to go outside to howl.
After I close the door behind him, I
catch a glimpse of my mother. She's no
longer moving the spoon. She, too,
appears to have an aching desire to scream.