By Mateo Moura Forero

My grandmother was shopping at the bread market
On a windswept Tuesday in the late afternoon.
Tonight, bread wasn’t for sale but images packaged in quiet retrospect,
And a neon light that buzzed the mind,
Greying her hair with a washed-out orange.

She rummaged through cobwebs and twigs, finding her scrawny husband with a coat of a mustache,
Her grandson who was illiterate when it came to her dream,
Another grandson who remembered that dream, yet did everything against it,
And a granddaughter so dislocated it was comical.

Her music, though colloquial, brought a live feel to her shopping.
The band came up and followed her —
One with an accordion,
Another with strings
And her husband who spoke a broken language lyrically.

She shook her hips with the beat, and opera lingered on the nose
With the scent of cheap cappuccino.

Tonight, she was alone.
She lay not in a crowd of old brothers and sisters,
But a pile of photos and videos,
Inked in a black and white future.
Nothing ever changed since then,
Yet she didn’t complain —
The store closed, and she was well on her way,
Back to the house in Votuporanga
With her now fat husband.

And the flowers wilt
With a nuclear family in between
A coming bloom
Of the bread market
that deals
With old, stale bread

Translation and Notes
“Pao” means bread in Portuguese
“Votuporanga” is a municipality located towards the northwest of Sao Paulo, Brazil

Mateo is an aspiring writer and musician from the United States. He currently lives in Barranquilla, where he studies international business. Some of his favorite musicians are Miles Davis and Nina Simone.