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).