PUBLISHING NEW WOMEN POETS SINCE 1997

Jacqueline Balderrama reads from and discusses Now in Color
for the Boutelle-Day Poetry Center at Smith College TONIGHT Tuesday, April 27, 7:30pm EST
Free to all, but registration required.

 
 

Emerging BIWOC Poet Spotlight 
 
April 2021 Poet: Paula Mendoza


Lucy

Make it snakes. Whom were always deceiver and forfeit.
As I am always derivative. A sap. The sticky. Stain
of his leak. What's crusted the slip. What makes it so
hard/beat fast/feel sad. If a matter of origin, I'll throw up
a cosmos. Twinkle-lights pock my smile with zodiac.
Make it the first time I let him, his O-face smeared
into an Edvard taffy theatre mask. His joy was terrible.
Its in-and-in-and-in, whorls of wet, agitated sand
that could not bear my weight. Make it a heavy sound.
Make it roach scuttle in cathedrals. Make it rainstick's
thirsty lie, faux firelight, and the gas turned up. Make it
black-out sex forgetting she had a name. I get ahead
running towards a dangling carrot's veiny slow dissolve.
I move my lips but only his sounds come out. I motor
hind hooves and the cyclone dust kicked up vanishes me.
About my head, a red halo dilates. She is not my own
god, I am my own. My god, make it snakes. Make one so
onyx a glossing, so diamond a tip, my every shiver's incision.
 
 
from Play for Time (Gaudy Boy)

To read more about this poet and her work, check out our blog.

* Carol Edelstein Books: Two-for-One! *
 
Our blog series "The Story of My Book"chronicles Perugia's books through their authors' words. Our Poetry Month post features
Carol Edelstein on her book The Disappearing LettersThe first
will also get a *free copy* of her new Simian Press book, Past Repair. 


 
PERUGIA PRESS
PO Box 60364, Florence, MA  01062