Juanita Rey: "Phone Call From La Ramona"

Phone Call From La Ramona

It is my cousin on the phone.
I am stirring soup
while listening and talking.

The recipe is my mother’s
though I couldn’t find
a couple of the ingredients
in the store.

Between tears,
my cousin reports
how her father,
my favorite uncle,
is losing his sight.

He is the one
who read to me
from a book of fairy tales
when I was a child.

I should be there
doing the same for him.
Not stories of princesses and princes
and dragons of course.
But headlines from the newspaper.
Baseball scores.
The latest weather warnings.

Out of the blue,
I hear news
from the same past
I’m trying to recreate
in a pot on the stove.

The soup doesn’t taste half-bad
as my neighbor would say.
But why this soup
and not some other?
Only a blind man
would know for sure.

Juanita Rey is a Dominican poet who has been in the U.S. for five years. Her work has been published in Pennsylvania English, Harbinger Asylum, Petrichor Machine, and Madcap Poets.