I tape a red telephone to its ear so that the fetus appears to be speaking to someone.
“Write about a time when you were forced to do something you didn’t want to.”
The man from the dairy, dick in both hands, like it’s a bottle of champagne.
I follow a nurse into a room lined with cots, wearing paper-blue slippers.
The doctor: “Want to know what it is?”
“Look into the picture, see yourself before any of this happened.”
I dream, I tell Marcos, of combat; weapons, when I reach down, appear.
I Jet Ski over pudding, cross a river of chocolate cake, order pizza on the moon.
A car window rolls down: “Sabes hablar español?”
“One day you’ll think of men and it will be like looking at a gray wall.”
Doesn’t “embarrassed” sound like “embarazada” in Spanish?
The phone rings, it’s the devil—I forgot to tie up the dog.
Overheard in Mexico: “What’s a girl with seven brothers?”
On General Hospital, Luke raped Laura, then they fell in love.
Inside the trunk of the Impala, clubs and maces.
I’m in the car kissing a boy below a streetlamp vibrating with moths.
I pretend to lie in sand, be part ocean, dust from a candy cigarette.
Spanish feels like eating roses sprinkled with lime; English, peeling potatoes, barefoot.
A wedding party on the church steps; Dad, passing, honks: “Suckers!”
Grandpa, putting money in my hands: “Ride that bike like the wind.”
“When you see yourself is there an observer?”
A boyfriend: “You blacked out and we had sex to calm you down.”
“Your pussy’s like a clamshell it closes like a purse.”
I rode through the stars, through streets where the wind talked to everyone.
Savage birds called out and I looked up and listened.
Diana Marie Delgado grew up in Southern California. A recipient of a 2017 NEA poetry fellowship, she attended Columbia University and lives in Brooklyn.