​The smell of Suriname cherries

By Constance Mello

​My grandmother with her different eyes
Pulls me toward her underneath the Suriname cherry
Tree until our foreheads touch and all is one
Eye. She makes a hooting sound

Under the Suriname cherry tree where my swing
Swung alone and with me the big Suriname cheery tree
The perfume that I seek for until today
In the glass bottle I get for Christmas

When I think of home it is a slow moving
Olive oil stream viscosity that leads toward
The meaning, the smell, the face of a grandmother
I haven’t seen in three years
​
Today I drove on a highway all made of concrete
There were clouds in the sky like the ones I knew from
After a storm, at home. I smelled something,
I put my tongue out to taste it

---

Constance Mello (she/her) is a Brazilian scholar, writer, and teacher. She graduated with a degree in Cultural Studies and Gender Studies from the Humboldt University of Berlin, Germany, and is currently pursuing a dual Master’s Degree in English and Creative Writing. She writes about migration, identity, love, and loss, and has been published in The Ilanot Review, Fearless She Wrote, Latinx Lit Mag, and elsewhere.