Louis Gallo’s most recent poem to appear here was To All the Music I Will Never Hear, published in June 2011 as part of Contributor Series 9: If Men Had Ears. Don’t you just love the sprawling way Louis tells a story?
Rosa
By Louis Gallo
By Louis Gallo
Back then I had a new girlfriend and of course
we were mad about each other, so mad we snubbed
everybody and missed appointments and skipped
classes and forgot our jobs and you know how it goes.
I don’t know anything about Mexican food
because I come from a large Italian family
and no other cuisine is tolerated,
but Rosa loves this little Mexican place, El Ranchito,
on Elysian Fields, a dump really, somebody’s house
refashioned into a restaurant, and in those days
you don’t find Mexican just anywhere, not like now
where on every second corner one shoots up overnight,
El Puerto, Cinco de Mayo, Casa this, Casa that, …
there are only three or four in the entire city
and Rosa really digs El Ranchito with its five or six
tables draped in red-and-white checkered oil cloth,
its sole proprietor, a stout, short but jovial woman
who serves as hostess, waitress, cook and whatever,
and I can’t remember her name but she smiles
all the time and can’t speak English too well
so I wind up saying things like por favor and gracias
and what little Spanish I know, agua fria maybe,
quanto dinero? since no prices grace the menu.
Rosa tells me I have to try this thing called empanada,
a fried pie stuffed with shredded meat or chicken
and lettuce, sour cream and grated cheese and guacamole
with I think parmesan sprinkled on the outside
and let me tell you it is sublime,
greasy as hell and a cholesterol nightmare
though I don’t know about cholesterol yet,
and it has some other secret flavor, something
lemony but not lemon, what? I don’t know
but it’s burrowed into my brain and I’ve spent
much time exploring herbs and spices trying
to find it and sometimes I think I come close
but never quite get there, and I’d give a lot of dinero
to anyone who can identify that mystery.
I want to taste it again, so much sometimes
I peruse Mexican cookbooks hoping I’ll come across
some rare entity that just might be the thing.
You don’t find empanadas on the menus
of many of the newer restaurants … it’s all tacos
and casadia and refried beans now, and I don’t know why
no empanadas, or maybe they have a different name now.
Rosa and I spend many a night gorging at El Ranchito
but one day the place abruptly closes …
a handwritten sheet of paper Scotch-taped to the door,
that’s all, gone for good, and not long after
Rosa and I break up, less abruptly, and all that’s left of the era
is a beautiful taste in my mind and this fierce hunger
for more smiling senoras, more future and more past.
Except that Rosa’s back a few months later
and we get married across the river by a justice of the peace.
