after she couldn't bring herself to say the word "lesbian"—it stuck in her throat like cattail down to its stalk on a windless day—and so instead she said "same sex." She said "who you think you are," and I didn't bother correcting her because I know my saviors. Before the meds, before the friends, before the realization that flipped me right-side-up, it was the house finch flinging treble notes to the sun. The fossils in limestone, the smell of the balsam fir. The cinnamon roll thawed in the microwave and gulped down with cafe con leche. Waiting for the next episode of the animated show about queer witches. Reading what the others have written down to make their resting places, following them in my little handcar of poems. So I try to tell her, and she is blank and disappointed under her Bible-verse decals, and I burn, I burn with lust for living.
Monica Colón is a Salvadoran/American writer from Waco, Texas who has lived and studied in the Chicago suburbs and Querétaro, Mexico. Her poems have been featured in Susurrus Magazine, Cool Rock Repository, and Paddler Press. She is a Pushcart Prize nominee and the winner of the 2021 Iris N. Spencer Sonnet Contest from West Chester University Poetry Center.
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how could I not read voraciously until the very end of this poem, after those opening lines...this is the kind of poetry I love!
Amazing freaking poem. Thanks for writing it.