Faint afterglow of skin

is a swallow’s flight.

Brown of cheek,
the ripple of a pond.

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I’m surrounded
but I’m alone.
My hours are manipulated
by job and rent,
by how the greenery here
is dour, secretive,
compared to the wide-opened

palm-front waving colors back home.

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Look here,
in this field,
a squirrel takes the low road,
a flock of starlings the seedy grass tips.

They would not do that
where I am from.

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And by the banks of the stream,

two fishermen
watch and feel
for the tug of a fish.

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I could say a word
so foreign to their ears,

so natural to mine,
they would die from
a struggle to understand,

I of loneliness.

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A Walk This Way

by Juanita Rey

 

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Juanita Rey

Juanita Rey is a Dominican poet who has been in this country five years. Her work has been published in Pennsylvania English, Opiate Journal, Petrichor Machine and Porter Gulch Review.

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