This selection, chosen by guest editor Sarah Clark, is from Tortillera by Caridad Moro-Gronlier, released by Texas A&M University Press in 2021.
What I Should Have Said, Instead
For Zelda
I took you to Arby’s for lunch to get you talking. Something about that ten-gallon hat inspired courage and you glowed like the cocuyos we trapped in glass jars that summer you were five and sure Papi was right about everything, including me. You unearthed confessions, meteors that streaked past your lips. Explosions— I may not graduate. We never use condoms. He grabs, but almost never hits. Geese do it too, tuck their heads beneath a pall of fluff to keep from noticing the danger all around—Styrofoam cups that fool babies into taking strangled bites, silent alligators that prove lethal beneath the green guise of indifference. I ate your fries. Shoveled them down my throat like a grave digger. I spun sugared sentences into webs sticky with logic, but you swept them away with bristles long practiced at the art of cleanup. On the way home, I missed my chance to get it right, missed the moment when you asked me to go back for the purse you’d forgotten on the table, missed my chance to try again as we pulled into the same parking spot and walked through the same double doors back to the moment when I got it all wrong, missed the miracle of your purse, right where you left it, still untouched, valuables intact. I threw stones when I should have created a pile, planted a rock garden, assembled sentries to guard against erosion. We could be there now— weeds blooming into flowers, talking about nothing, nothing at all.
Caridad Moro-Gronlier is the author of Tortillera (TRP 2021), winner of The TRP Southern Poetry Breakthrough Series and the chapbook Visionware (FLP 2009). She is a Contributing Editor for Grabbed: Poets and Writers Respond to Sexual Assault (Beacon Press, 2020) and Associate Editor for SWWIM Every Day, an online daily poetry journal.
Sarah Clark is a mad crip genderfuck two-spirit enrolled Nanticoke editor, writer, and cultural consultant. They are Editor-in-Chief and Poetry Editor at ANMLY, Editor-in-Chief at ALOCASIA: a journal of queer plant-based writing, Co-Editor of The Queer Movement Anthology (Seagull Books, 2024) and the Bettering American Poetry series, and a current Board member and Assistant Editor at Sundress Publications. They have edited folios for publications including the GLITTERBRAIN folio and a folio on Indigenous & Decolonial Futures & Futurisms at ANMLY. Sarah freelances, and has worked with a number of literary and arts publications and organizations, including the Best of the Net anthology, contemptorary, Curious Specimens, #PoetsResist at Glass Poetry, Apogee Journal, Blackbird, the Paris Review, and elsewhere.
