Lydia Cortes
Find the Form to Love Your Life (Section 7)
Wear the sweaters the pants the socks doubled up everything We had we had on doubled sometimes tripled with the blankets And the quilts also thrown over our shoulders over our heads And still we couldn’t stop the chill from entering through the Fontanel through the ears through our eyes our skin penetrating The bone our teeth chattering didn’t matter if it was in English In Spanish it seemed to us even colder to be subjected the freeze To the air clouds that we breathed out of our mouths when we Talked when we opened our mouths clouds of cold air escaped But we could go nowhere we had to stay till the esteem returned Got to get this down get it all down cause it’s getting too long in my Head and it’s getting folded over and twisted one on top of the other One word added to another and another and these long lines don’t
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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