juaN baeZ

Writing at juanbaez.substack.com - in English and Español. Food and cooking, health and fitness, creative non-fiction, and personal stories.

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Roasted chicken on a bed of bok choy, with steamed vegetables, and a lemon-butter-muchroom-chicken au jus sauce. Good eating should not only be reserved to restaurants.

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Fancy shmancy ramen for my daughter and I. Shrooms, bok choy, crispy pork belly, soft boiled egg, kombu, bonito flakes, furikake, a lonely tomato from the garden, homemade broth, and uni. Yes, UNI! 🔥🍜

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“The ones who hurt us cannot heal us. That’s not the way it works. That’s not the way it ever works.”

— Ashleigh Catibog-Abraham, There’s Nothing Left to Save

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Imagination

by James Baldwin

Imagination creates the situation, and, then, the situation creates imagination.

It may, of course, be the other way around: Columbus was discovered by what he found.

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Cheese steak subs for dinner.

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The Life You Could Be Living (if You Weren’t Living This One)

by Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg

The life you could be living aches in its compression, tires of being a spark, an asteroid, a falling raindrop bouncing when it hits. It’s wound tight between muscle and sinew, lodged in the happy gaps of a synapse. It’s fluid like flowers. It sounds like geese out of sight. It’s marvelous as falling asleep when exhausted, and it foreshadows your dreams like a stray piece of sunlight or an unnoticed icicle.

Pull apart the paper vignettes and subtle understandings. Find a favorite shoe lost decades ago, a line to an old song, and behind that, the melody that once made you lift your arms and twirl in your childhood bedroom after dark.

This life startles you with its foreign tongue of traumas and kisses, its vulnerable eyes staring into yours for mercy as it lies down beside you, tries to say — although it doesn’t know your language — that it’s okay how it turned out, that it’s still here, and despite its wish to be lived, it’s not going anywhere.

[vexheart]

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The Rider

by Naomi Shihab Nye

A boy told me if he roller-skated fast enough his loneliness couldn’t catch up to him, the best reason I ever heard for trying to be a champion. What I wonder tonight pedaling hard down King William Street is if it translates to bicycles. A victory! To leave your loneliness panting behind you on some street corner while you float free into a cloud of sudden azaleas, pink petals that have never felt loneliness, no matter how slowly they fell.

[letsbelonelytogetherr]

— Megan Fernandes, Do you sell dignity here?

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