Lydia Cortes
Find the Form to Love Your Life (Section 5)
If even poor of money clothes you had a roof above Your head that head with the hole right on top there On your skull where you felt the cold when the land lord The lord of the land on Stockton St in Williamsburg the Lord of the land on Ryerson St in Fort Greene in the Tenements where you and your family your Mami your Papi your little sis and little bro lived always wondering Will we have heat today the silent radiators were sadness Personified the water icy too icy to bathe to shower only Barely tolerable to take a puta’s bath in the ponchera The basin why did we call the basin the ponchera did it Somehow come from word punch ponchera where you Put the punch in where you scooped it out with a ladle And poured it into your cup the punch the kool aid we Drank so many envelops full of crystals purple red orange Thousands of crystals melded with sugar so much sugar
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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