By Emily Portillo

             after Eavan Boland and Leonard Cohen

I think of her as the bread lady. Every day she carries it,
new bread, simple white loaf, bouquet of crumpled plastic pinched
in her right fist, down Church Street singing I’m just a station on your
way, I know I’m not your lover. She brings her tattered heel down on the instep
of my droning preoccupation with dinner and laundry and
whether or not the dog has pissed in the house again. The
cold holds her breath so that she is a mirage in its wake. A common
face, my grandmother would have said. Now she says only my fingers hurt.
Only I miss being alive. Is the loneliness hardest? Or the not knowing which
way is home? Every day, the bread lady pays with cash in order to be touched.
Every day my grandmother catches more in the cracks. I know you
are heartbroken. I, too, lay awake some nights, wincing. But I’ve made
an ordinary life of it: unfettered love. Hot metal singe and all. And you
can’t do much better than that if you happen to find yourself here, and human.





Note: This is a golden shovel. The line “It pinched your instep and the common / Hurt
which touched you made / You human” is from Eavan Boland’s “Ode to Suburbia.” The
italicized lyrics in lines 3 and 4 are borrowed from Leonard Cohen’s “Winter Lady.”

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Emily Portillo is a queer poet, mother, and shameless partaker in delights. A 2026 Lambda Literary Fellow, her work has been honored as winner of Reed Magazine’s Edwin Markham Prize for Poetry, among others. Read more or get in touch at emilyportillo.com.