Olga Abella

MORNING LIGHT

The waitress does not see me watch her every day at the coffee shop. I sit at the table that lets me look at her from the side as she toasts bagels, whips coffee into froth; sometimes her socks are lime yellow against her skin, smooth curve of a pear. Her hair comes loose when she bends too far into the sink, her face flushing as steam draws sweat in neat lines down her cheeks. She brings me coffee, toasted sourdough with butter and jam. I allow myself one quick look into her brown eyes, wonder if she sees me blush, if she can imagine a woman dreaming of the freckles on her neck, of my lips skimming over that tiny gray scar above the thumb of her right hand. And I wonder if she would pale at the words I write for her every day as I watch the slant of morning light darken all in the room but the small rise of her wrist. Olga Abella

WHAT IS LEFT OF ME

I watch my mother at the stove sprinkling comino into the salted water of the arroz con pollo. I don't know the word for the intimacy I feel as she leans to taste if the spices are just right. I can't tell her how much of me is occupied by that small gesture, how much of her and me is lost in translating into a language I cannot always find, or how much of me will fade when my last reservoir will die, her words even now surfacing only in dreams where I am four speaking the sounds of her tongue, jugar, comer, dormir, trabajo. Just these simple ones remain, linger in faraway brain cells I dust off for my trips to Miami, my weekly calls home, traces of the me I did not become.

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