In a city, hundreds of miles away from the corncrib
of my childhood, Mozart plays on the hotel piano,
and instantly I feel the reverberations of chords
along cool stucco where, as a child, my bunk bed
pressed against the living room wall. My sister’s
practicing the same section over and over again
just to make it right, and I am here, so far away,
trying to remember the crawl space between
my father’s seat on the tractor and the window
behind him. An area just big enough to haul
my blanket and fall asleep to the image
of a plow overturning the earth between rows
of corn. My head vibrating to the rhythm
of the machine beneath me. I am here,
standing among marbled floors and suited strangers,
trying to remember how my family stood
on the porch in spring to watch flashes of lightning
brighten the darkened sky, how the smell of petrichor
filled our lungs, and after the storm, how the taste
of cinnamon rolls, fresh from my grandmother’s oven,
lingered.
Ms. Salvador’s poetry has been published in Prairie Schooner, Southern Poetry Review, The North American Review, North Dakota Quarterly, and Water~Stone Review, among others. She is the recipient of a Vogelstein Foundation Grant and the Patricia Dobler Poetry Prize.
