Destierro Means Exile

It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!

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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.

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Yaddyra Peralta is a Honduran-American poet, essayist, and editor. In 2011 and 2016, she was named one of Miami’s 100 Creatives by the Miami New Times. She has been the recipient of residencies from The Betsy Writer’s Room, Jaffe Center for Book Arts at FAU, and O, Miami Poetry Festival’s Off-Shore virtual residency for poets of the Caribbean and Caribbean diaspora. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in BOMB, Grist, Ploughshares, Sink Review, Jai Alai, The Florida Review, Miami Rail, and the anthologies Eight Miami Poets (Jai Alai Books), The Breakbeat Poets, Vol. 4: LatiNext (Haymarket Books) and Home in Florida: Latinx Writers and the Literature of Uprootedness (University of Florida Press). She lives in Miami, FL.