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Virgil Suárez

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The Face of Jesús in Campbell’s ABC Tomato Soup

for Johnny Cash

While our daily soup simmers on the stove,
my grandmother claims Jesús’s face has appeared
there out of the boiling liquid, a spattering shape
on the nicked porcelain stove, crown of thorns
and all. And last week it was La Caridad
in a burnt piece of toast.

              And the days pile up into each other: work,
school, the clothes we will send home or take to church
for the poor, or the resoled shoes my father leaves
like dead crows by the front door, or our three-legged
cat who dangles from the end of the patio’s brick fence,
a mangled mockingbird in its bloody paws.

In my bowl of Campbell’s tomato alphabet soup,
the word “surrender” blurps to life in the edges.
A mop next to an empty trough, a wood dove stopped
for a drink, but the trough is dried up, rusted through,
crabgrass grown in a tuft. If I say “Jesús,” my mother
will think of blasphemy. My father is at work at this

              hour. In his final hour he will clutch his heart
with both hands and say: “Cristo mio!” But nothing,
not even the blue-zap of electricity passing between
the paddles of a difribulator can bring him back. Look
into my bowl and you will see my own reflection, a boy
of twelve - already lost in this foreign country, hands

held in prayer to this Christ of soup, and crimson words.

 

Page(s) 179

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