Panaderías

My local bakery sells donuts at .90 cents
I walk there at dawn to remember my mother
My mother isn’t dead, but we are strangers now.
This walking to bakeries was our shared ritual.
I called them panaderias back then
Although we never spoke when we walked
I suspected she was in search of something significant
but now there’s a swollen country between us
and I’ll never know for sure

on my way to the bakery, I pass through a lake
that long ago belong to a slave-owner
until the Earth stole it back and swallowed it whole.
Lake Eola isn’t a lake- it’s a sink hole
named after the slaveowner’s sweetheart.
A story as southern as pecan pie,
peach cobbler, and white supremacy.

Today, the air is thick with the stench of sulfur
and trees grow triumphantly through the water.
if I arrive before the sun wakes
I’ll find a flock of American White Ibis
sleeping serenely in the Cypress Tree,
insensible to the violence they rest in
Even in the dark, I notice the irony
but I know better than to think of it
thoughts like these make ghosts out of sanity
I slide a soggy dollar to the birdlike women
at the bakery, and she hands me a stale donut
above us, a dozen lazy buzzards ride
thermal ways around skyrises.

By Grecia Espinoza