This selection, chosen by guest editor Sarah Clark, is from Tortillera by Caridad Moro-Gronlier, released by Texas A&M University Press in 2021.
That Night at the Rack ’Em Room
She talked me into a pool hall strung out on tequila and cafecito a gang of troubadours singing her praises Damn, baby, you so fine! as we walked in. And she was. The kind of girl who could get away with Brazilian jeans. I was coming off a bed-rest pregnancy— skin stretched soft and loose a half-racked game, but with her, I felt bold and pliable, shards of never-say- never stuck in my throat. I wasn’t good at geometry, how to control the crash of the cue ball, the candy-coated orbs that scattered into constellations across the felt, but she kissed me for luck and took her shot, all angles and elbows, taking them down with a click of the stick, the suckers who lined up just to watch her bend over that table, hair blazing a trail toward the sun that rose out of the low-slung horizon of her waistline, a single dot that chased its tail into a swirl I rode, knowing even then everything spirals downward but she kept shooting me smiles, sinking one after the other, me along with them.
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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