A Poem by Paige Quiñones

Author: Poetry Editor

March 28, 2018

This month, as a part of the Poetry Coalition’s new initiative Where My Dreaming and My Loving Live, the Lambda Literary Poetry Spotlight will feature poems of and about the body. This week’s feature is by Paige Quiñones. 

 

Poem for the Girl Who Loves Girls

 

No empty merry-go-rounds.
No visible scars through the holes in your jeans.
No trading painkillers on the swings.
No signatures on your pink and green Chucks.
No after-sex cigarettes,
          no we should be in a movie speech.
Don’t steal her dad’s car.
Don’t shave her in the shower
or take pictures of her Barbasol bikini.
           No pretend threesomes.
Nobody will ever know about us, a secret.
No holding a baby finch in your hand,
small as a raisin. No tossing the ones that
don’t make it into the trash.
No seeing her in the orange trees,
in cracked sea glass.
           No dreaming. No, you can’t dream yet.

——

PAIGE QUIÑONES is a PhD fellow in poetry with the Center for Mexican American Studies at the University of Houston, where she is an assistant poetry editor at Gulf Coast. She received her MFA from the Ohio State University. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Barrow Street Review, Copper Nickel, Muzzle Magazine, Quarterly West, and elsewhere.