Lydia Cortes
Find the Form to Love Your Life (Section 8)
Fit in the head and they start to crowd one another into coils of strings Of long convolutions of head speech words crowding other words almost Hurting one another the way they must if there’s not space for them to Be in the same place for long they must be let out to prance to breath To show off their worthiness to show off their brilliance their sparkle But not if they can’t be seen all crowded and glopped up together Like soggy spaghetti over done into a paste let out the voice let it out To let in the voices the other voices that want to come in be safe from All that coldness out there you have to have a relation to form and shape Otherwise it’s a mess and others can’t enjoy like mushy overdone pasta One pasta for all forever and ever amen one and all one perception leading Superseding immediately to another content being form being content
Editor’s Note: “Find the Form to Love Your Life” is a long poem that we are posting in eleven sections on consecutive Saturdays.
Lydia Cortes is the author of the poetry collections Lust for Lust (Ten Pell Books, 2002) and Whose Place (Straw Gate Books, 2009). Her work appears in the anthologies Puerto Rican Poetry: An Anthology from Aboriginal to Contemporary Times (U Mass Press, 2006) and Breaking Ground: Anthology of Puerto Rican Women Writers in New York 1980-2012 (Editorial Campana, 2012). Recent work has appeared in Upstreet and on the Black Earth Institute’s 30 Days Hath September poetry feature curated by Patricia Spears Jones.
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