Destierro Means Exile
By Yaddyra Peralta
It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!
For Hurricane Irma Come water. Come lift me bodily, in hopes that my soul too may rise. Come wreck the artifacts of this lived life. Come lick my fingerprints off the childhood photos. Take the travel guidebooks, the embossed-in-plastic Made in Chinas. Carry me out to open sea. Let the salt feed on my memories. Outliving the Holocene drifting and unseen with the plankton let me live. Past memory, I will return too cool to be a prodigal.
Yaddyra Peralta is a Honduran-American poet, essayist, and editor. In 2011 and 2016, she was named one of Miami’s 100 Creatives by the Miami New Times. She has been the recipient of residencies from The Betsy Writer’s Room, Jaffe Center for Book Arts at FAU, and O,Miami Poetry Festival’s Off-Shore virtual residency for poets of the Caribbean and Caribbean diaspora. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in BOMB, Grist, Ploughshares, Sink Review, Jai Alai, The Florida Review, Miami Rail, and the anthologies Eight Miami Poets (Jai Alai Books), The Breakbeat Poets, Vol. 4: LatiNext (Haymarket Books) and Home in Florida: Latinx Writers and the Literature of Uprootedness (University of Florida Press). She lives in Miami, FL.
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What a cool poem by Yaddyra Peralta. I'm interested to learn more about her work.