#relinquenda

[lifeinpoetry]

I too, someday, will end, & this forgetting is a kind of freedom.

— Alexandra Regalado, from "Five American Sentences," Relinquenda

[lifeinpoetry]

I sense the shipwreck, my human body sloughed off, cast away, sunbleached & bonewhite driftwood on a beach where my children will gather around the wreckage as it singes & cracks, into wind, ashes, everything I returned to, clung to, there & there & there, painting their faces, their empty hands, there, there.

— Alexandra Regalado, from "Elegy with Wisdom Teeth," Relinquenda

[lifeinpoetry]

What I know of my father, I’ve forgiven.

— Alexandra Regalado, from "Concierto de Aranjuez," Relinquenda

[lifeinpoetry]

I know, from here on out, this beast I lured & wrangled to shore, the fight is mine alone.

— Alexandra Regalado, from "A Family History of Alcoholism," Relinquenda

[lifeinpoetry]

My firstborn son would look at me from his crib with eyes like lamps, a tower of light searching. I was the dark rocks. How to live in that light? How could I hold it without also warning of all I could wreck?

— Alexandra Regalado, from "Vesper Bells," Relinquenda

[lifeinpoetry]

Yours is a call that doesn’t seek an echo but an embrace, swelling & blooming, tracing back to where one ends & the other begins. It is because you call from that other shore with all of your self that I can fling my self into that darkness between notes.

— Alexandra Regalado, from "Bufo Lovesong," Relinquenda

[lifeinpoetry]

Pain as something we need to cross, // a threshold We move through

— Alexandra Regalado, from "I Prided Myself on Being Aguantadora," Relinquenda

[lifeinpoetry]

My mother says he has to be in the ground for these poems to be born.

The tree in our front yard I machete to its milk heart.

— Alexandra Regalado, from "Escape Room," Relinquenda