Hola, it’s 3:05 PM! Time to take a cafecito break!
Welcome to Poem in the Afternoon, read by a woman-identifying writer who is attending Miami Book Fair 2023. Enjoy this taste of poetry, sponsored by Miami Book Fair, 305 Cafecito (Miami’s Official Cafecito Break), and SWWIM, with Miami's favorite beverage—a cafecito, of course! We look forward to seeing you at the Fair.
Appearance at Miami Book Fair 2023: Leslie Sainz, Saturday 11/18, 12:30 pm, Room 8303
Transcript of poem: The night, good, is a gorgeous clone of itself. Thinking of the slick roaches defecating in the silverware trays? Three times only. In two stacked plastic bags, five sour oranges pecking like past selves. The baroque garlic. The one and a half small onions. I squint at the tip of my nose until it becomes Abuelita’s. Gorgeous, good night with salt pork, cumin, oregano. Salt in the machacador, softening. Poinsettias court the window, court the light. Accidentally, inevitably, I leave some skin cells while retrieving four bay leaves. Never, ever, salt the beans says the father whose stiff fingers cannot shatter the cooking wine bottle because it is plastic. At midnight, the hair on my shoulder is someone else’s.
Leslie Sainz is the author of Have You Been Long Enough at Table (Tin House, 2023). The daughter of Cuban exiles, she is the recipient of a 2021 National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellowship. Her work has appeared in or is forthcoming from the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, the Yale Review, Kenyon Review, Narrative, and elsewhere. A three-time National Poetry Series finalist, she’s received scholarships, fellowships, and honors from CantoMundo, the Miami Writers Institute, the Adroit Journal, and the Stadler Center for Poetry & Literary Arts at Bucknell University. She is the managing editor of New England Review.
From the book, Have You Been Long Enough at Table (Tin House, 2023). This poem first appeared in Gravy Quarterly. Permission granted by the author.
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