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!
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)