The Wardrobe's Best Dressed: Angela Narciso Torres's "Blood Orange"

Sheer

At the foot of her bed,
my mother, one knee pulled to her chest,
slipped nylon stockings over toes
then heel, releasing inch by inch
without hint of hesitation,
fine flesh-colored gauze she’d gathered
in her hands, stretching it smooth
over shaved skin. Never once
revealing a snag or tear.

Now from the top of the stairs
my teenage son glares unblinkingly,
the distance between us
straining like the skin of water
in a glass filled past the brim.
I can almost see how much I need
to learn about when to tug
and when to let go. How far
the net will hold before it rips.

This selection comes from Angela Narciso Torres’s book Blood Orange, available from Aquarius Press. Purchase your copy here!

Angela Narciso Torres’s first book of poetry, Blood Orange, won the Willow Books Literature Award for Poetry and was published by Willow Books/Aquarius Press in September 2013. Recent work appears in Cimarron Review, Colorado Review, and Cream City Review. A graduate of Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers and the Harvard Graduate School of Education, Angela has received fellowships from the Illinois Arts Council, Ragdale Foundation, and Midwest Writing Center. Born in Brooklyn and raised in Manila, she currently resides in Chicago, where she teaches poetry workshops and serves as a senior poetry editor for RHINO.

Donna Vorreyer is the author of A House of Many Windows (Sundress Publications, 2013) as well as six chapbooks, most recently Encantado, a collaboration with artist Matt Kish from Redbird Chapbooks forthcoming in April. She is an assistant poetry editor for Extract(s), and her second collection is forthcoming from Sundress Publications in 2016.