BIO
A daughter of Central American immigrants, Melina Casados grew up in North Carolina. Now living in Brooklyn, NY, she is an MFA candidate at Brooklyn College where she is also teaching English. Melina is the poetry editor for Snapdragon: A Journal of Art & Healing. She was recently featured in Ice Colony's "What They Leave Behind Latinx Anthology" and has work forthcoming in "La Libreta".
Te ofrezco un café
I bake some conchas,
and when they’re ready, they
grow legs.
It’s not until they’ve
cooled that they grow arms
to pry themselves off the
parchment paper.
They sit up for a moment,
growing hands
to balance their seated
posture
on my sheet pan.
After a few minutes,
they tilt their bodies
towards my window
like there’s something
they can find there.
These conchas are stoic;
known as the quiet ones
in their relationship with
coffee.
They watch coffee entertain
guests
during dinner parties. They
are the ones
who planned the menu and
made dessert.
They rub coffee’s back
when they feel like calling
it a night.
It takes coffee a minute,
but coffee listens.
Coffee kindly and
efficiently prompts
the guests to leave, often by
creating
an excuse that indicates it
was coffee’s
idea to end the night.
Coffee has an instinct
to redirect any blame that
could be placed
on conchas, a habit coffee’s
therapist says
coffee likely picked up in
childhood.
It’s after everyone has left,
when
they’re putting away dishes,
that conchas ask if coffee
enjoyed
their evening. Coffee says
something
like of course while
acknowledging
that people can be pretty
draining.
They spend the rest of the
night
comparing notes and
observations
over the things people said
and did.
They like doing that. They
had complicated
upbringings you see, both
processed
products of love and
exploitation
(something to do with brown
hands).
I heard they focus on the
love,
grieve the exploitation, and
process the ways they’ve
been processed.
But still, there’s something
about how conchas
look out windows,
like they believe in gray areas.
Like they know coffee is a
seed in its ancestral form,
and that conchas only exist
when desired, made.