Some Years Demand Chicory and Cilantro
By Adriana Estill
October 15, 2023
October 15, 2023
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Counting today, I have spent one-tenth
of this wild and precious life dunking my words into salt water, shaking off the excess, and swallowing each one whole. They slide down my throat, lodge in my duodenum, fill my rib cage with the tang of quiet gloom. Some years demand chicory and cilantro in arkloads, compel me to forget the orange wings of monarch butterflies and focus on the chrysalis, its soupy imaginal cells, its bitter fluids. I hoard jarfuls of stones I have plucked out of the black beans my mother left me. When I have enough stones to leave a trail behind me, watch me dip my fingers in honey, drag the sticky sweet through my hair and paint my eye lids and lips, kiss each word as it emerges, wet and new, wings unfolding. |
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Adriana Estill grew up in California and eventually landed in Minnesota, where she teaches Latinx studies and literature at Carleton College. She has a poem forthcoming in Kakalak 2023; she's only just begun to dream of being a poet.
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