the pupusa is a portrait
of an honest earth:
the coarse burns continents,
the auroral dough a sea.
water joined masa through tumult
& sphered, flattened then crowned,
filled with meat & milk then smoothed,
heat birthed & bitten.
no, the pupusa is an homage
to the laborer’s backhand
where scars simmer & settle,
strawberry skin browns.
sweated flesh crackles on steaming metal,
grease singing smoke loud then sweet over & over,
flipped & rested, an iris weepy then dry,
ashen islands form & a back stiffens.
no, the pupusa is a documentation
of every pecado,
the taut pink palate
a receipt for indulgence.
a sheet of young wood pulp dims,
then an emergence of weighty shadows.
a sycamore pith rises & splits
& spits a globe of queso.
no, the pupusa is a bulging mirror
to this sleepless face. examine
the wrinkle bowls under each eye & find
another tired eye under another tired eye.
the cream sol bulges then sombers,
sunspots & scabs black;
what can this light nourish
but a body ripe with eonic exhaustion?
no, the pupusa is a portrait
of this life, crusting & breaking
with every lick & tooth, the desire & gift
of jarabe yielding to the shape of a belly.
crack open the soft disc egg
& study its ivory thick blood & tender marron,
stretching like a timeline of grief,
& lap the fresh veins.
What Keeps Us
Poems to Read in Community
Inspired by C. D. Wright’s poem “What Keeps,” we offer Reyes Ramirez’s “Pupusas” as part of a twenty-poem selection from poems we’ve featured in 2024—poems, like bread, that one might pass across the table—to a loved one, or to oneself.
Read editor Lloyd Wallace’s introduction to the collection and statements from our staff readers here. Read poems by selecting below.
Throwback Night, Midway Skating Rink
The sun dipped already, but we sweating, edges ribboned under
summer’s breath.
My Father Walks Out of an English Book and Into an English Field
It was not long after the war—
and just saying after the war places him
Half-Life in Exile
I’m forever living between Aprils.
The air here smells of jacarandas and lime;
Country Song (Memory of Rain)
A bruise is a promised haunting.
“Come, just this once,” I ask, disingenuously. I mean “a thousand times.”
At the Gellert Baths, Budapest
Here in the body museum,
women speaking Hungarian
rinse one another with buckets of water,
As Though It Were a Small Child
I wake up these days, a new mother again, watching,
waiting, to understand what to offer, how to serve, by which I
mean,