Destierro Means Exile

            For Hurricane Irma

 

Come water.

Come lift me

bodily, in hopes

that my soul too

may rise.

Come wreck

the artifacts

of this lived life.

Come lick

my fingerprints off

the childhood photos.

 

Take the travel guidebooks,

the embossed-in-plastic

Made in Chinas.

Carry me out

to open sea.

Let the salt feed

on my memories.

Outliving the Holocene

drifting and unseen

with the plankton

let me live.

Past memory, I will return

too cool to be a prodigal.

---

Yaddyra Peralta is a poet. Her work has appeared in Ploughshares, Jai-alai, Abe’s Penny, Tigertail, The New Poet, and Hinchas de Poesia. In 2013 she was a Visiting Writer at the Betsy Hotel’s Writer’s Room in South Miami Beach, Florida, and one of six collaborative Helen M. Salzberg Artists in Residence at Florida Atlantic University’s Jaffe Center for the Book Arts, where she completed the book Conversation, Too, along with Tom Virgin, John Dufresne, Kari Snyder, Laura Tan and Michael Hettich.