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 the White Girl Asked at Our 20th High School Reunion
Why weren’t we friends in school? We weren’t friends because I knew you hung out in the American parking lot unlike my boyfriend who parked his Stingray in the Cuban one on the other side of school. Of course I hung out there. Not that you would understand why being his girl meant I could not sit in your car at lunch and listen to your Def Leppard, your Mötley Crüe, leave him to fend for himself. We weren’t friends because he courted me old school, couched beside my father every Sunday while I served apprentice to my mother, her eyes onion stung, arms spattered with marrow and lard, who worked at loving her place at the stove, rules I had not learned how to break, yet. We weren’t friends because I envied the way you weren’t allowed to settle, how you were encouraged to date assorted breeds of boys who strutted across the lawn to ring your bell. Your dad waved his blessing out the door and didn’t worry because he taught you to discern, to choose among them, taught you to drive yourself, headlights set on more than the slam of the same car door, even if it was a Corvette.
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.
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