"black beans simmer with sofrito, chili, red onion
until steam clouds the room, tasting of sea salt.
What's between us thin as mist, raveling, unraveling,
As strange. How real is it? When she takes my face"

The speaker notes the cooking's smell, and color and language and culture and even politics. The "sofrito, chili, red onion" in combination with the prior stanza's "saffron" give us the aroma of something akin to the sea shore. There is fish in the dish being cooked. No need to mention it... The speaker alludes to the mist of ocean spray; the connection to ocean is strong here but stops short of literal transmutation and leaves us hovering in the "steam clouds." Leaves us tasting the "sea salt." We know so much about the mother and thus the distant loved one just through these simple details.

Sofrito is traditionally only made twice a year. Plus to add onion to sofrito is considered heresy by some and essential by others. The onion is a non-traditional ingredient. Saffron rice is a dish not associated specifically with any culture as it is in cuisines from Indian to Puerto Rican to Italian. But in all cases saffron is expensive. The plantanos is clearly Puerto-Rican. But the mix here is part of the interest. The speaker, not a Hispanic American is transcending themselves.

At the edge of the sea of the emotional state, we are in the arena of magical realism. There is between speaker and mother, speaker and lover, something "thin as mist, raveling, unraveling." The connection achieved is an association of consciousnesses. The speaker feels understanding encroaching like mist or fog but the connection is ephemeral, temporal, fleeting. The connection is "strange." The speaker even questions how long the relationship with the lover will last. Implicit in the "How real is it?" is an uncertainty about this status. What is the speaker doing here in this room with this not quite a mother-in-law? The question asks if the speaker's love is real. Doubt, illusory imagination, passing affections, mist: then through the fog come the forceps of the mother hands plucking the speaker's head from the haze. The mother "takes" the speaker's face. The take is forceful and strong...more than a caress or a cradle. The third stanza's tercet reintroduces the fruit and also leaps out of real time more dramatically than in the mist in the prior stanza.

"in her hands as if she would slice open a fruit,
her ravaged voice cutting through me, I see her as she
must have been once, afraid of nothing--long before"

The hands of the mother return from the first stanza. In the first stanza the hands peeled and split fruit. In this stanza she takes the speakers face in her hands with the same abrupt if not rough pull, 'as if she would slice open a fruit." The fruit is the speaker, but the fruit is also something shared between them. The fruit is also the opening up of the mother. First, the mother's voice cuts open the speaker. It is a "ravaged" voice. I hesitate to follow that word all the way through to its implications. This poem filled with its grinning and cooking and raveling shocks me with the word ravaged. The word is a well-placed surprise. My heart sinks.