In the Afternoon
by Achy Obejas
You worry between pots and pans
about your body swollen;
straightening your back,
the snail's roundness your own.
You cringe. You're embarrassed.
You see too many similarities with the soup spoons.
"It's nothing," you say,
your skin rice paper, tea color,
and musty like a morning bed.
In the afternoon, we buy bread
and cheese, hard because
you want to cut it with a blade.
Your finger has string around it
to remind you of me.
You add wine to the shopping list.
I want to take two hours to read,
to do nothing, to find a place on the tree
to carve our initials. I have no knife.
You, stretching, reach for the ceiling
and blue lines shoot through
the inside of your arm -- neon,
a boulevard, water for the garden.
You laugh, tell me I would not survive
in the wet, black-green of the forest.
"Your skin," you say, touching this, touching that,
"is too light, too bright. Something would eat you."
I want to take a long nap,
stiff-fingered, limp breasts,
sour-sweet like a baby's breath
in the cave, in the cave.
Achy Obejas is the author of the critically acclaimed novels Ruins, Days of Awe, and three other books of fiction. She edited and translated (into English) the anthology Havana Noir, and has since translated Junot Díaz, Rita Indiana, Wendy Guerra, and many others. In 2014, she was awarded a USA Ford Fellowship for her writing and translation. She currently serves as the Director of the MFA in Translation program at Mills College in Oakland, California. The Tower of the Antilles, Obejas' stories of contemporary Cuba, is longlisted for the 2018 Pen Open Book Award and for The Story Prize. This poem first appeared in her poetry chapbook This Is What Happened In Our Other Life, published by A Midsummer Night's Press.
"Where My Dreaming and My Loving Live: Poetry & the Body" is the second annual offering of the Poetry Coalition -- more than twenty organizations nationwide dedicated to working together to promote the value poets bring to our culture and communities, as well as the important contributions poetry makes in the lives of people of all ages and backgrounds. A founder member of the Coalition, Letras Latinas at Notre Dame's Institute's for Latino Studies has partnered with the Best American Poetry blog to present 10 poems by women in March that engage with this year's theme, which borrows a line from U.S. Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith's "Flores Woman." The poems in this project were curated by Emma Trelles.
