WEDNESDAYS WITH DENISE: JANUARY 4, 2023

Today’s poem is by Anjanette Delgado—a powerhouse of a Miami writer. She has mostly written prose—the novels The Heartbreak Pill and The Clairvoyant of Calle Ocho, with a third novel and a short story collection forthcoming in 2024. She’s also the editor of the multi-genre anthology Home in Florida: Latinx Writers and the Literature of Uprootedness. Please welcome her to poetry-land!

SUICIDE BLOUSE

The blue silk blouse 
breaks before it 
grazes my ribs. 

I don’t want to die. 
I want to kill 
myself, my elbows 

splayed above, up, 
over my head stuck 
in the textile, in its steel, 

my fat—trapped—as if 
I were praying to the skinny 
girl, all B cups and bones, 

I’m told lives inside 
my excess brown 
pounds forced to wear 

Lycra. That girl stretches, 
then screams, this is no way 
to breathe, or be— 

still, why can’t silk 
slide, graceful, on its way 
down? A lovely puddle 

of blue, diving, unworn, 
headfirst into the ground 
beside my feet. 

It’s art, says the skinny 
girl then, and she’s not 
talking about me.

(first published in SWIMM, December 15, 2022)

 

Comments

[Karen Beckworth]

What a spectacular title! Thank you, Ms. Duhamel.