Kaylee Salazar
Cosechadores
They lift their bodies before dawn,
out of bed into dew-drenched fields,
rows and rows feeding the horizon’s
green mouth. Yesterday’s labor an unoiled
hinge: shoulders, spine, hips, all squeaking
open and shut. Men and women at work,
snapping strawberries off stems, collecting
cratefuls, crouched and stoop-backed,
dirt smudged into their furrowed brows.
Bandanas and cotton cloth clinging to skin
like the slow trace of lime spit down the body
of a cold glass. Twenty pounds of fruit
is worth two dollars—a day of labor
is enough for bread and formula, not rent,
not new shoes for their mud-cut toes.
Still, they’re quick, hands dirt-bitten,
cracked from routine. Running and picking,
running and picking until the sky yawns awake,
until gray fruit turns red, and light settles
on the tight muscle of every bent back.
Candy Seller
Slick skyscrapers thin-tipped,
needles piercing the night’s felt;
the whole city sticks to skin.
Rain pins Manhattan’s edges down,
pigeon-placed seam allowances,
subway station gussets.
14th St—
the 3 train like a running stitch,
rail lines darning the island—people
packed, pushing, plowing, past the woman
on the platform. The occasional raindrop
from pavement cracks, leaking pipes,
but she doesn’t notice. She’s working,
an Ecuadorian migrant, her face
like my fingerprint. Her baby slung to her back
like a button keeping the cold at bay;
woven manta brighter than anything
New York has seen, fabric colors
from our sky-scraping
mountains, indigo and the achiote tree.
The blanket before her stocked
with candies and salted mango slices,
a sample of the summer ferias back home.
Candy and fruit! she calls,
accented like she held a lollipop in her mouth,
but it sounds like playing Kiwi with my cousins
—stacking bottle caps on the street,
bowling them over, scrambling to fix the tower
before the punted soccer ball found our backs.
She is tinder in the snow,
hard at work, and a beautiful
tapestry hanging in this sour city.
Mexican Floods, October 2025
Para los pueblos de Hidalgo, México y para todos los pueblos que han sufrido.
The river let itself in—braced
its wet shoulder against the bridge
until it broke, an unlatched gate
swinging open.
Hidalgo like a crumb on Mexico’s smile lines,
smudged away by the Cazones’ rain-bloated finger.
When the floods come, there is only this:
sludge—houses drowned, dragged
to the mountain’s foot, chewed up cars spit
to the side, neighbors pulling bodies to the surface,
ravine walls sloughing off,
an untouched playground, the yellow
plastic slide like a beacon
against the town’s grime-soaked gray.
Firulais dogs trembling on roofs,
barking, howling, sniffing for food.
Parents tugging babies in tub buckets,
children lifted onto shoulders,
feet still skimming black murk,
a horse clopping over rubbled buildings,
its rope halter towing a broken fence post. Grief
like sandbags packed into the wound of a missing town.
Names lost to the wind,
lost to the shrieking and shouting.
There’s no God, no government here,
but faith in hands gripping shovels,
in arms lifting walls off broken legs,
off elderly and mothers shielding
their babies. There’s a man on a boat
helping the stranded get to stable ground.
There's a girl lowering a matted mop head
into the stream’s mucked mouth to lift a cat.
There’s the sole baker bearing bread wading
the water current to feed his community.
Mud-mottled hands pushing rickety
wheelbarrows over glass and fallen
roof tile, cement slabs and flattened
businesses—the lone tire chattering
over the trampled town to a rhythm
that almost sounds like
fuerza, fuerza.
Confessing a Family Secret
Let me admit that my father hits me.
I don’t feel any less embarrassed,
but I’m saying it out loud at least.
I’ve been beaten my whole life, but I am four
in this one, sitting at the dinner table,
my feet don't touch the floor yet.
Here, my world is—purple plaid,
glitter-pen-scribbled knees, a man
waving from the muenster moon.
Here, I still climb on my father
when he gets home from work.
Here, my food is untouched, cold,
and that can’t go unpunished.
My ankle clips every step as he hauls
me upstairs by my wrist. The horse whip
hooked on the back of my door is cured,
soaked to make it stiffer, more effective.
He drops me on the bed, but I’m only four
and I haven’t learned the word abuse yet,
so I hug him, whisper in his ear
that he can talk to me, explain
what I did wrong, because he’s my father
and I love him.
It's too difficult, what happens next,
so I’ll say that my body is a lens
and each lash is a hammer nailing
the photo I take to the wall:
three sweat beads pearling his left brow,
his tongue stuck out the side of his mouth,
the dome light washing him in haloed hues,
the arc of his catgut arm rising higher, higher,
the cherub decals on the ceiling. Una niña.
Mi papá. El chicote.
He hits me anyway.
Kaylee Salazar is an Ecuadorian-American poet from northern New Jersey. She graduated from the University of New Haven with a BA in English and is now pursuing a creative writing MFA from Southern Illinois University. She works as an editor for the Crab Orchard Review and as a poetry reader for Sontag Mag. She currently resides in the Hudson Valley.
Banner Art:
Photo by Tim Mossholder, Unsplash, 2020
