MY MOTHER COOKS
Our last supper together was arroz con pollo. There was
no wine. We had no disciples. It was only my mother
and me in the small kitchen. It pleased her to serve me one more time.
Maybe she knew it was going to be our last.
My mother rose early that day.
She asked when I would arrive. She did not want to be late.
She made tortillas and set them as gently as newborn babies
on top of a cotton cloth where she covered
them to keep them warm. And
like the thousands of times since
she began cooking at eleven years old when she ran out of choices,
she measured nothing.
She had no recipe propped up to tell her how to make the dough,
how long to roll it, how much to make
so that it was always enough.
She tossed it together like her life
had been tossed. Like fall leaves and confetti.
Tossed.
She did not need instructions.
Her hands remembered how.
It stuck to her like a tattoo, like the gray in her hair or
the lines her life had carved into the corners of her eyes.
She could not tell you how
it had come to this.
She remembered.
That’s all.
We did not pray at our last supper.
Maybe she did.
In her head while I ate.
Maybe she did.
But I knew no prayers that fit.
And have learned none since.
At our last supper
she was two months short of ninety-three.
She would
be dead in one.
—from Rattle #85, Fall 2024
__________
Gil Arzola: “Nobody cooks like your mother. Among the clearest of my childhood memories is the smell of arroz con pollo (rice and chicken) coming through the old screen door of the migrant cabin where we lived while working the fields. It was a special treat, and I mentioned that to my mother years later. On a visit to see her, she made it for me. It was our last visit, as it turned out, other than visits to the hospital a few months later. This poem was born of that.”
