Faint afterglow of skin
is a swallow’s flight.
Brown of cheek,
the ripple of a pond.
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.
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.
And by the banks of the stream,
two fishermen
watch and feel
for the tug of a fish.
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.
A Walk This Way
by Juanita Rey

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.