She wakes when the howler monkeys
grunt, just before the Tico dawn.
She warms the beans and rice, fries the
eggs and some cheese and feeds four
sons and her husband who feed the
pigs and chickens and leave to taxi
tourists or move cattle around the finca.
She sweeps the house, shines the tile floor, and
when the truckers wake and have moved down
the muddy mountain to the jagged coast
she enters their payments into the hotel books
and cleans the cabinas one by one,
strips their beds and washes the sheets
in a sink with a bar of blue soap
then hangs them to dry on a long line strung
between the avocado and mango trees.
She tackles a pile of ironing,
presses jeans and cotton shirts.
When the heat hits the armpits,
she’s infused by her husband in the
steam of his sweat. There’s a scorpion in the
pile she kills with a flick of her fast
painted fingernail and the click of her heeled shoe.
She winnows the rice and puts chicken
soup with ayote on the stove to feed
everyone who sits and then siestas.
She stands and urges eating until its gone,
spooning a few hot bites in her mouth
to make the tropical air seem cool,
then she turns her back to wash dishes and
waits for everyone to trickle
off to sleep. Her work begins.
She goes to the porch and sits down,
flips a few switches and the humming begins.
She sews hemlines, repairs split seams,
makes anything to order—a sweetheart neckline,
a slit up the leg—for a Tico, a gringo,
wanderers, locals. A German woman once brought
her a pair of overly worn unwashed shorts
with a threadbare crotch. She fixed them
and marveled a woman would leave her a thing so
dirty. She sings with her parrot and
swings the fabric around the machine while
the lora rocks on its perch.
The long needle of her baster bounces
like a camel cricket and gets faster
and frantic in the heat, the suffocating cloak
that forces each napper to violently
gasp awake. She flips the switches,
goes back inside to make rice pudding and
clean the bathroom, hoping to get in another
nip or a stitch before the sun falls
behind the mountain.