Diana Marie Delgado

Summer 2023 | Poetry

Two Poems

Someone’s Kissing Me in the Roses

 

1.

 

Book about a warden who blows prisoners through the bars.

 

Book about a pirate and a red-headed maiden.

 

Taken aboard, tied to a bed and raped. 

 

They call this kind of book a “bodice ripper.”

 

2.

 

What if something bad happens? What if I fall in love?

 

3.

 

Notice the paper got wet.

 

4.

 

There is porn on the dresser.

 

A French maid uses the end of a feather duster to pleasure herself.

 

We used their phone to call a sex-line and their parents,

 

After getting the bill, told me—don’t speak to our kids again.

 

5.

 

Book about a girl whose interior life fell apart.

 

Practicing what I thought it would feel like.

  

6.

 

To stop attracting something, uproot that desire.

 

It’s possible that I made that up.

 

7

 

The archaic meaning of wench is prostitute.

 

Bodice and a white blouse.

 

Shoes with extreme buckles.

 

8

 

It’s different for women, everything hurts.

 

He tells me, this dick is yours, all yours. 

  

9

 

I want love, extreme love.

 

Love that burns as I go through it.

 

It’s sophisticated espionage, love.

 

All of us, dead.

 

Yet no one ever calls it murder.

 

10.

 

Rumi says: The way you make love is the way God will be with you.

 

Every time I read that line; I want it out.

 

11.

 

I am telling you the right story.

 

The problem is that it doesn’t end.

Diana Marie Delgado's first book of poems, Tracing the Horse, was a New York Times Notable Pick. She holds degrees from Columbia University and the University of California, Riverside, and is the editor of the forthcoming poetry anthology, Like a Hammer Across the Page: Poets Writing Against Mass Incarceration (Haymarket Books, Spring 2024). 

Diana recommends Taiga Syndrome - Cristina Rivera Garza (Dorothy, A Publishing Project, 2018), The Employees - Olga Ravn (2022, Lolli Editions), and Chariot - Tim Donnelly (2023, Wave Books).

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