When I Was Straight

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Welcome to SWWIM Every Day’s annual Miami Book Fair preview. Please subscribe to SWWIM Every Day to watch a daily video by a woman-identifying writer appearing at Miami Book Fair 2024. Enjoy this taste of poetry, sponsored by Miami Book Fair and SWWIM. We look forward to seeing you at the Fair!

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Appearance at Miami Book Fair 2024: Caridad Moro-Gronlier, Sunday, 11/24/2024, 2 pm, Room 8303

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After Maureen Seaton


I married a straight man & stayed
married for sixteen straight years.

I said I love you straight-faced, but I knew
the truth—I was no straight arrow.

My parents thought I held a straight flush
when I brought home a boy with straight blonde hair

& blue eyes, a real straight shooter who asked Papi
if he could take me off his hands. Straightaway,

Papi said yes. I was 20 & it was time to straighten
me up & out of his house. He thought that straightlaced

Americano would make me walk the straight
& narrow, straitjacket my mouth, & remove

the straight edged razor from my demeanor,
but that boy thought I was straight up awesome

even though I felt straight up awful that I wasn’t
straightforward about kissing my best girlfriend

or just how dire the straits of my desire for her
were, a want I was not straightbred for.

For sixteen years I tried, but I was never straight
with him until I walked straight out the door.

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In April 2024, Caridad Moro-Gronlier was appointed the second Poet Laureate in County history by Miami-Dade Mayor Daniella Levine Cava. She is the author of Tortillera, the winner of the TRP Southern Poetry Breakthrough Prize published by Texas Review Press (2021), and Visionware (Finishing Line Press, 2009) as well as the editor of Grabbed: Poets and Writers Respond to Sexual Assault, Empowerment and Healing (Beacon Press, 2020). Her work has been featured in The Best American Poetry Blog, Verse Daily, NPR, The Hive, Split This Rock, Essential Queer Voices of U.S. Poetry, and others. She is the recipient of a Julia Peterkin Literary Award, an International Latino Book Award Honorable Mention, an Eric Hoffer Book Award Honorable Mention, First Horizon Award Finalist, three Miami-Dade County Department of Cultural Affairs Miami-Dade Individual Artists Grants, an Elizabeth George Foundation Grant, and a Florida Individual Artist Fellowship in poetry.

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This poem first appeared in Pleiades: Literature in Context, Pleiades 441, Spring 2024.

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