by Anjanette Delgado

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.