“Because the way you grow old is kind of like an onion,” Eleven by Sandra Cisneros
You’re sixteen and you’re stuck / in the onion layer of fifteen fourteen thirteen / Look at the dawn creased across your brows / Look at me now / All these sunset emotions / What do I do with them? / Let me tell you something, Hummingbird / The stars fold in on themselves once every two-hundred years / and the last time it happened, my father stole avocados from / my uncle’s garden to gift my mother, father trekked the bowl-rim of / Yextla to the peak East, smiled at my mother and / asked for a second and third serving of crema fresca on his beans / Hummingbird, my father doesn’t like crema fresca but he liked the swish / of my mother’s skirt against her calves in the dim moonlight / of her wood and clay kitchen / Hummingbird, you’ll be seventeen and / sixteen underneath this new onion layer and / I won’t be here to see your dimples every time you smile / For this, I’m thankful and sorry / I’ll forget the flower I stole from a coffee shop / because it reminded me of you and I won’t tell you / I take after my father.
Header photograph © Annika Ruohonen.
Kenia Romero is a Mexican poet and writer. She currently lives in South Carolina’s Lowcountry. Her work has appeared in the Acentos Review and Adelaide Literary Magazine. A graduate of the South Carolina Governor’s School for the Arts and Humanities’ Creative Writing Department, she will be studying Psychology and Creative at Warren Wilson College in the Fall 2019.