Cristina del Canto is a bilingual award-winning writer and poet. She’s been published in Bewildering Stories, Full of Crow Literary Magazine , Blue Lake Review, Fowlpox Press, Broken Wine Magazine, Masque Publishing, Pink Mouse Pub, The Writer’s Literary Muse, Burning Word, Ascent Aspirations, Misfits Miscellany, Fullosia Press and Pirene’s Fountain. Cristina currently lives in Houston and is working on her first novel.
Fall 2012
Table of Contents - Vol. VIII, No. 3
Poetry Fiction Translations Reviews
Cristina del Canto
On the night of your death
I eat alone, stomach clenched as tight
as the adductor muscles in my scallops,
I prod, and prod, chopsticks in my right
hand, ring on my left.
I go back to the Green Trails days,
when we rode in your Jeep
your dark, curly hair blowing in the wind.
And the nights--
curfews looming
over us like storm clouds.
Our hands were not wrinkled then,
they were baby smooth as our faces
when we dressed in blue and walked the
stage that May, waving goodbye to our youth,
waving goodbye to each other.
I walked the bayou that summer,
the blue bonnets near your house
were unusually dull. And when it rained,
your West Point letters came pouring down,
and I thought of you.
We called them the Green Trails Days.
The days before Sam Houston ordered
the bridge across the bayou, if you
were still here, that bridge
would lead me straight to you.
© Cristina del Canto
