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YOUR CART

LUISA CAYCEDO-KIMURA

Wreccum Maris

                         I used to watch you scrub your hands
             search the beds and edges of your nails
until the cushions of your fingers
 
resembled oyster shells
             early summer mornings we’d watch
                         the beachcombers along the Rockaways
 
                         per English law what the sea spits out
             goes to the crown absent an obvious owner
here in New York it’s finders keepers
            
in Queens mamá taught me
             about riptides and jellyfish
                         you talked to the old men 
 
                         in Florida you hate the heat the salt the sand
             the water people who don’t speak Spanish
the bugs are all recalcitrant the birds are loud
 
the day that mamá died I saw you wash your hands
             at eighty-one your nails are still like rose quartz
                         hers were aged ivory
 
                         you stared at me your wrangled daughter of the ocean
             no longer clam or glass
drowned away from mamá’s shore
 
             I spit you out
                          I spit you out
                                      I spit you out

September / October, 2022

Barbara Daniels
Luisa Caycedo-Kimura is a Colombian-born writer, translator, and educator. Her honors include a John K. Walsh Residency Fellowship at the Anderson Center, an Adrienne Reiner Hochstadt Fellowship at Ragdale, and a Robert Pinsky Global Fellowship in Poetry. A two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, her poems appear or are forthcoming in The Cincinnati Review, Shenandoah, Mid-American Review, Rattle, RHINO, Diode, Nashville Review, The Night Heron Barks, On the Seawall, Sunken Garden Poetry 1992-2011, and elsewhere. Caycedo-Kimura serves as a member of the Hill-Stead Museum’s Sunken Garden Poetry Festival's Poetry Advisory Committee.
Art:  Madge Evers. Zyg. Mushroom spores on paper, 
  
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