No light like refrigerator light,
like fluorescent bulbs warming up
my mother’s limbs as she finds purpose
in digging through a catalogue of bald
chicken, foil-wrapped tortillas, Tupperware
towers of unknown food. She reaches
toward the back, exhumes a pack of
wine coolers, four bottles decorated
like priests—their gold collars sweating
a baptism on her palms, a rite she rarely drinks,
but which she falls into as night quickly falls,
popping and hinging the rim on her mouth
like muscle-memory, like some instinctual need
to bathe the stay-at-home Spanish caked
to her lips all week. She sits next to me,
drums her loose fingers on the table,
on my scattered sheets of homework
scrawled with practice lines of English
that barely crawls from her throat, but that now,
another bottle in, becomes easier to pronounce,
even as she anchors a hard e to an s,
even as she confesses, as she slurs esweet
and estrawberry, that no matter what language
I learn, salvation will never mean as much
as death.
