Emerging BIWOC Poet Spotlight
This monthly series features poems by women of color in the early stages of their careers. It is our intention to create more space at Perugia for the work of BIWOC, and we hope using our modest platform to celebrate this work will expand the readership of the poets we spotlight. This series aligns with Perugia’s mission to support and promote emerging women poets; all the featured poems will be from BIWOC poets with no more than one published full-length collection. We’d love to hear from readers with suggestions for poems & poets to feature.
April 2021 Poet: Paula Mendoza
LUCY
Make it snakes. Whom were always deceiver and forfeit. As I am always derivative. A sap. The sticky. Stain of his leak. What's crusted the slip. What makes it so hard/beat fast/feel sad. If a matter of origin, I'll throw up a cosmos. Twinkle-lights pock my smile with zodiac. Make it the first time I let him, his O-face smeared into an Edvard taffy theatre mask. His joy was terrible. Its in-and-in-and-in, whorls of wet, agitated sand that could not bear my weight. Make it a heavy sound. Make it roach scuttle in cathedrals. Make it rainstick's thirsty lie, faux firelight, and the gas turned up. Make it black-out sex forgetting she had a name. I get ahead running towards a dangling carrot's veiny slow dissolve. I move my lips but only his sounds come out. I motor hind hooves and the cyclone dust kicked up vanishes me. About my head, a red halo dilates. She is not my own god, I am my own. My god, make it snakes. Make one so onyx a glossing, so diamond a tip, my every shiver's incision.
Source
Play for Time, Gaudy Boy, 2020
Poet Bio
Paula Mendoza’s work has appeared in Bennington Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Yalobusha Review, and elsewhere. She earned her BA at the University of Texas in Austin, her MFA at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, and is currently pursuing a PhD in Creative Writing at the University of Utah. Her first book, Play for Time, was selected by Vijay Seshadri for the Gaudy Boy Poetry Prize, and published in spring 2020.