Separate but Umbilical Situations Relating to My Father

at nine years old I ran acquainting yourself with this process is wise he did grandpa before I was able to ask what he could teach I was chubby with welts and a famous father who took me out of school to board a bus headed to a racetrack where I sprained my ankle and was told we’ll leave after the 9th leave cigars that burned cherry-red holes so that now grown riding my bike from K-Mart where they pay me in cash I am happy to sit below a coat of arms on a Naugahyde couch counting money in the middle of summer with a box fan and those times when things happened when he became afraid the police reported that he’d overdosed at St. Martha’s Church and where have I been when I have been told so many things because to get out is to still be there and that means being a woman is unlucky and so I tend to return to a bird I dreamt of once a mother who said I love him only I love him with sorrow so please don’t search for my father he is homeless and paid in cash to pick up a broom and sweep 

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Diana Marie Delgado, Literary Director of the University of Arizona Poetry Center, has more than twenty years of experience working in not-for-profits that advance social justice and the arts. She has worked at a range of organizations, including The Clinton Foundation, Coalition for Hispanic Family Services, and now the University of Arizona Poetry Center. A published poet, her first collection, Tracing the Horse, was a New York Times Noteworthy Pick and follows the coming-of-age of a young Mexican-American woman trying to make sense of who she is amidst a family and community weighted by violence and addiction. Her chapbook, Late-Night Talks with Men I Think I Trust, was the 2018 Center for Book Arts winner and she has published poetry in Ploughshares, Ninth Letter, New York Times Magazine, Colorado Review and Tin House. Her literary interests are rooted in her experiences growing up Chicana in the San Gabriel Valley of Southern California. She has extensive experience working both in and with communities color, after spending more than a decade working and writing in New York City.

Art: Public Domain