Mise En Place
I believe my father assembled me from wings and duct tape.
My mother said he fell asleep and the next day I was born.
She didn’t stop me from planting avocado pits,
only from handling a sparrow that fell from its nest.
Birds are mean by nature.
I grip the tail of a salmon, knife between skin and meat, I pull.
I never delighted in the way men looked at my mother.
It’s easy for a man to find someone to wash his clothes.
A tomato loves a sharp knife, light, and the sting of salt.
When I come home she wants to know if I’m hungry.
I sit at the head of the table,
my husband brings me another fish.
Monica Rico is a CantoMundo Fellow and Macondista who grew up in Saginaw, Michigan. She is an MFA graduate of the University of Michigan’s Helen Zell Writers’ Program, winner of a Hopwood Graduate Poetry Award, and works for the Bear River Writers’ Conference. Her poems have appeared in The Breakbeat Poets Vol.4 LatiNext, Anomaly, Pleiades, Black Warrior Review, BOAAT, and Split this Rock.