Three Poems By Jessica Ciencin Henriquez
Christopher Crouzet, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
Like Being Loved
We climbed into the volcano.
Thick, decadent, warm mud welcomed us in,
but would’ve shown no mercy should we have sank under.
Slick skin, buoyant breasts, hair tugged
by rain-soaked earth.
We laughed, finger-painting
warrior stripes on each other’s cheeks.
We were like children.
No, we were children–in bliss.
What a gift—
to float in much, to rise amidst sulfur,
to bob in the soil’s rich batter.
After,
with hair, lips, every slip of skin
coated in quickly drying clay,
we walked toward the river,
becoming more statue with each step.
And then a woman as old as my mother
held my hands as I dipped beneath the surface.
With a bowl, she rinsed me clean,
emptying, filling, emptying it over me,
rubbing my scalp with her nails’ edges,
gliding my hair through the bells of her knuckles.
She untied my bathing suit, twirling, twirling,
dancing ripples along the river
until the only residue of the afternoon
stayed set in my mind.
With one hand, she covered my eyes,
and with the other, she finished caressing me clean.
In her service was a softness—
one stranger willing to wash another.
It felt like innocence, like baptism.
It felt like being loved.
Surrender
We saw a dead hummingbird on my birthday.
She lay on the ground, still and serene,
surrounded by catkins.
It was as if the willow tree had witnessed this loss
and did what little he could
to bury her with honor.
That night, as I fell asleep
with your sweet breath on my neck,
I asked my life, what can we let go of?
Then watched as my grip loosened
on every single thing I thought
I could never surrender.
Surrender
We saw a dead hummingbird on my birthday.
She lay on the ground, still and serene,
surrounded by catkins.
It was as if the willow tree had witnessed this loss
and did what little he could
to bury her with honor.
That night, as I fell asleep
with your sweet breath on my neck,
I asked my life, what can we let go of?
Then watched as my grip loosened
on every single thing I thought
I could never surrender.
Press Between Pages
My grandfather is dying,
and outside the hospital, a man sells mango
with limón y sal. My aunt and I split one;
we both like it bitter.
She walks under the shade of a guayacán,
and white florets fall into her hair.
I tell her, wait, don’t move,
we want them to stay.
My grandfather is dying,
and every day, we come and say goodbye.
We can only visit two at a time—
these are the rules in the final hours.
So we lick salt from our fingers, sign in, and wait
in the chapel’s pews outside his room.
Rosaries hang beside the candles
we are not allowed to light.
My grandfather is dying,
and his chest heaves
while the machine beside him sings
its constant song: still alive, still alive, still alive.
My aunt lifts his hand to her face
and cries into his palm, asking forgiveness,
offering forgiveness while
her white florets fall onto his sheets.
My grandfather is dying,
and I hold his one hand with my two.
I don’t think he’d ever felt my fingers
brushing his, not since
I was a girl and he was guiding me
through church, sitting me in the front row
reserved for the pastor’s kids.
Why do we do, during death,
the one thing we refuse in life?
Soften, whisper, apologize.
My grandfather is dying,
and my mother paces in the
corridor praying for a miracle,
but there is no supplication to delay death
or coerce her to skip this soul,
move on to the next house.
But if there were,
it would sound something like
pleasepleasepleasepleaseplease.
My grandfather is dying
and dying and dying,
and we are slowly realizing
that this miracle has already
come and left—
the miracle that he lived,
that any of us get to live at all.
My grandfather is gone,
and when they tell us,
we hold one another and weep
from sorrow and relief.
No one knows the heaviness of hope
until it has burrowed into your bones.
Unrelenting, gnawing, digging.
My grandfather is gone,
and no one asked me to go in,
but my mother has gone,
and my aunt has gone,
and they are teaching me
how to lose a father,
a lesson I don’t want to need.
My grandfather is gone,
and the doctor leads us through a maze
to the hidden hospital basement
where the bodies go.
I stand at his feet,
his belly swollen so I can’t see
his face, but I imagine the look of someone
seeing the truth still etched on his cheeks.
My grandfather is gone,
and as they gently slip a tag around his ankle,
I think of when my son was born—
how I kept that tag when we left the hospital
and pressed it in a baby book between clips of hair
and his footprint—how fast this goes.
They lift him from one bed to another,
and I watch as they zip the black canvas closed.
My grandfather is gone,
and I have never been so close to the ending,
touched by death before it was sanitized.
My mother, my aunts, my grandmother, and I
walk beside the stretcher,
exiting behind the hospital where a white van waits,
its doors already open as if welcoming him
through heaven’s gates.
My grandfather is gone,
and we watch two men load his body,
shut the doors, and double-tap the window.
The van disappears into traffic, behind
taxis, motos and chivas.
We let go of him the same way
as all of the other grandfathers,
absent fathers, never-were-fathers,
homeless men, and holy men.
I want to take a piece of him,
but there is nothing left.
So I reach for a lowered branch and pocket
a palm of florecillos to press between pages.
My grandfather is gone,
and buses fill with people
coming to honor him, bury him,
thank him goodbye.
We wail and we laugh, we sing, we kiss,
and send white balloons to the sky,
and throw red roses into the same earth
who will one day widen her floorboards
and invite us all to join him.
This thought sits perched on my shoulder
chirping, both reminder and relief.
About the Author
Jessica Ciencin Henriquez is a Colombian-American writer, editor and teacher. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Teen Vogue, Time, Parents and Oprah Magazine. She is the author of the poetry collection Burn After Reading (Rev Publishing, 2025). You can find more of her writing @TheWriterJess http://www.instagram.com/thewriterjess .