Monique Quintana – Eating Sweets and the Domestic

Monique Quintana

Eating Sweets and the Domestic

            For Nancy Hernandez

All night we pour milk into clay cups. As I write this, I lay in a haunted house. I will never believe it again. Rice and milk climb in our throats. This is a ladder to who knows where? This is the only time we can sing a powder soprano. I am a second soprano. I never got to sing in the discant. When I was in college, my white teacher tried to get me to sing the washing machine line from the West Side Story song as a solo with an accent. I couldn’t do it and never went back to that room even though I often passed it. I never sang again. Thank you for laughing at her even when you weren’t there to see it. Now I know this is what ghosts are. When will we do the washing machine? This walk to pine garde is longer than I expected. Chips of stone fall into my rain for fortune. I eat the milk and rice in an old-new bed. It feels neutral in here, like spice in our throat. Spice is not violence if it makes us remember our dead.