A CURE FOR BACK-ACHE by Camila Hernández

it is lunchtime

& the countertops are green with stains like continents,

a dozen injured pots wobble on the stove,

a hum of yellow aromas encircles the paralysed stare

of a lightbulb, a globe of warm fruit – the afterglow announces

the stains of its slow music, so your abuela can see

where the hot oil has rouged her forearm

she waits for the arepas to char with mottled brown caritas

on the budare, blackened, bent & well-loved – twisting her mouth

into a lovely scheme, she squints at the golden sun – her delicate,

tamarind cheek creased in the places you’d kissed it

is a beadwork of sweat & toil like the make-up of maize kernels

dripping with salt-sweet butter between your sandy fingers

on the coast of Margarita where the sea composes its own music

through the turbulence –

you get back from the beach, by six you had grown

suspicious – you were still here

she fixes you like a flower bouquet, moulding you

into her postural expectations – a hand

on your chin

         “que linda”

                     & the fossils rest & you rise –

but you are not beautiful, nor good, nor a great

granddaughter. it was time

to flip the arepa, & she knew how to tell

by leaning her head to one side, listening

as she cradled it in a kitchen towel, waiting

for its secrets that only she could hear –

(the coastline’s broken voice

“siéntate a comer”

& all its crags)

she serves you and wilfully forgets

a plate for herself – a spoonful of beans dusted with a hail of sugar,

next to white rice it looks like a fibrous snowstorm, sweet

& full of mud, small stones, all the stones that built you

steaming, scorching your eyelashes – the bitter peppery undertone

is a streak of red in the dark stew, the blood’s red pencilling

becoming part of the dish, of the text of living, black stones under

big-bodied waters dragging their bodies from one shore of grief

to another

& your beckoning spoon is a painter’s brush

baptising them with cane sugar, casting a pastel sheen

white as the snow you’ve never seen

next, a serving of arepas – these piled, puffy yellow dishes with crooked

black smiles are cradled in a patterned tea towel to trap the heat in,

your grandmother gives you more – juicy, wood-bark brown meat,

corduroy-creased, tender & threaded through a

burgundy wine

then, slivers of fried plantain, mounds of golden starch

piled & pure tangerine, a loud yellow, a sudden

cardinal flame – the sweetness is visual, caramelising the same

air the sky sways herself on, a plantain

is a burst of sun, a Midas touch on the palette of a plate

mixed in with unlikely colours,

a rainbow afterglow of a hand-sewn meal

food plated to stand together –

she has chosen to feed you first, so you sit alone,

on the wooden stool with no back to it,

her gentle vibrato sighs seem

a less manufactured recline, her concentrated

coffee breath cooing you as you eat

& when your plate begins to empty,

she grips her unwashed ladle &

replaces the food you finished –

even before you speak, she serves you

abrazos as if to breathe you inside her – her habit

of holding your hand from the passenger seat,

as if those seats, too, had no backs to them

& a dust-clogged clock

in the living room ticks

like a slowing heart

& the palm trees sagged outside,

& the ocean swept you apart

*

flakes of rice began to sour in foreign winters

where lullabies were swapped for blaring sirens –

her sancocho broths passed through the throat much too easily,

without the tension of a yucca root’s woody cells

zigzagging on your tongue –

ocumo. aji dulce. casave. onoto. tres leches. nouns

you can smell but not touch or wholly taste or

bite off the pages where recipes fade into the folds

of her cling-film hands –  the aftertastes that glowed in your mouth

you can now only find in edible poetry, the digestible lyrics

of Simón Diaz through cables holding on to silence, your abuela’s bendición

infused with the static of an unstable internet connection

& her voice sounds more & more like glass each time she reaches out

to touch the memory of you

on a screen.

you find yourself at a city’s edge

& the breezes she sends you, to breathe & hold,

fill the distances, to straighten your spine

when you hunch at the table – until one day

she sighs along to the voice of memory,

to the resonance of ancestry, to an ever-selfless network

of exodus –

without her guidance, you burned your hand

cooking over a low flame, that flame now ever-stuck

under your skin, a scar raised like a frontera which conceals

the way out. 

it is no longer lunch-time

& now you want out –

to unzip the lakes between you,

an ache-song booming ashore

to walk into each other

again,

for the first time.

Camila Hernández is a Venezuelan-born poet based in the East Midlands. Her work, featured in The Looking Glass, The Madrigal Press, and Fawn Press’s The Thicket, dwells at the meeting point of self and landscape, tracing modern and postcolonial perspectives through vivid terrains of ecology, memory, and history. Camila has also participated in the First Steps Poetry programme (Summer, 2026) at Birmingham Hippodrome, where she deepened her practice in both page and performance poetry, discovering new creative pathways through spoken word and live performance.