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Orange Blossom Review

A Journal of Creative Arts

Writing Poetry After Turning 46

Issue 4 | Summer 2020 | M. Soledad Caballero

Writing Poetry After Turning 46: a shape poem with a curving vertical structure down the page in two parts. Part 1: What should I do with the left overs left over love, left over grief, left over sorrow. What should I do with the left over past, the one that gets stuck in the back of my throat, the one that gets hooked into my heart, my lungs the one that slinks into the middle of today, unnoticed at first, yet growing, half formed strange a Phoenix charred in the fire unable to grow

Writing Poetry After Turning 46: a shape poem with a curving vertical structure in two parts. Part 2: back wings take flight beyond the sun. These leftovers never grow. Half done things, aching insect bodies with out legs, without wings without mercy. I have tried so long to sew on new buttons, to plant the unsprouted bits. It is like making bread with card board and crazy glue. I have tried to make space for how they do not fit inside any boxes, how they ooze out of every thing like jelly fish. Nothing works. The left overs hide in the corner like kudzu, crawling up the walls, eating up all the other plants, choking all the birds, coiling themselves around the furniture. Invasive, unrelenting, they grow, crustacean creatures, all claws and eyes. Noxious to all things, all new memories, all new love. There are too many of them to start over, too many of them to hide. And I am left with a raw heart covetous for new seeds.

M. Soledad Caballero is Professor of English at Allegheny College. Her scholarly work focuses on British Romanticism, travel writing, post-colonial literatures, WGSS, and interdisciplinarity. She is a 2017 CantoMundo fellow and has been nominated for two Pushcart Prizes. Her poem “Myths We Tell” won the 2019 Joy Harjo poetry prize for Cutthroat, A Journal of the Arts. Her poems have appeared in The Missouri Review, the Mississippi Review, the Iron Horse Literary Review, Memorius, the Crab Orchard Review, Anomaly, VIDA, and other venues. Her book, Birds of Prey, won the 2019 Benjamin Saltman Poetry Award and will be published by Red Hen Press in 2020.

Filed under: Poetry

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