Suicide Blouse

The blue silk blouse 
breaks before it  
grazes my ribs.  

I don’t want to die.  
I want to kill 
myself, my elbows  

splayed above, up,  
over my head stuck  
in the textile, in its steel,  

my fat—trapped—as if 
I were praying to the skinny 
girl, all B cups and bones,  

I’m told lives inside 
my excess brown 
pounds forced to wear  

Lycra. That girl stretches, 
then screams, this is no way 
to breathe, or be—  

still, why can’t silk 
slide, graceful, on its way 
down? A lovely puddle  

of blue, diving, unworn,  
headfirst into the ground  
beside my feet. 

It’s art, says the skinny  
girl then, and she’s not  
talking about me.

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Anjanette Delgado is a Puerto Rican writer based in Miami, and the award-winning author of three books: the novels The Heartbreak Pill and The Clairvoyant of Calle Ocho, and the multi-genre anthology Home in Florida: Latinx Writers and the Literature of Uprootedness, published by the University of Florida Press in 2021. Anjanette's work has also appeared in The New York Times’ “Modern Love” column, Vogue, NPR, HBO, Kenyon Review, Pleiades, the Boston Review, Lithub, Electric Literature, Tupelo Quarterly, Prairie Schooner, december magazine, The Rumpus, The Hong Kong Review, and others.