In the place where sad
is a verb she holds
the window open
as if light were a book
she could live in.
Over and over
her small hands
the fragile, brimming
cup, the bluest
page. Love’s tender
necessary grammar.
A flower pressed into the flesh
of a reminder. Words
twisted into feathers.
Tiny arrows. Her broken
origami bird.
Silvia Curbelo was born in Matanzas, Cuba, and emigrated to the U.S. with her family as a child. Her poetry collections include Falling Landscape and The Secret History of Water, both from Anhinga Press, and Ambush, winner of the Main Street Rag Chapbook Contest. She has received poetry fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Florida Division of Cultural Affairs, the Cintas Foundation, and the Writer’s Voice, as well as the Jessica Noble Maxwell Memorial Poetry Prize from American Poetry Review. Her poems have been published widely in literary journals and more than three-dozen anthologies and textbooks, including Poems, Poets, Poetry (Bedford/St. Martin) and The Norton Anthology of Latino Literature (W.W. Norton). Silvia has lived in Tampa, Florida, all her adult life.
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