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Elisabet Velasquez is a Boricua Writer from Bushwick, Brooklyn. Her work has been featured in Longreads Magazine, Muzzle Magazine, Winter Tangerine, Centro Voces, Latina Magazine, We Are Mitú, Tidal and more. She is a 2017 Poets House Fellow and the 2017 winner of Button Poetry Video Poetry Contest. She is a 2019 Latinx fellowship recipient of The Frost Place. Her work can be found in Martín Espada's Anthology What Saves Us: Poems Of Empathy and Outrage In The Age Of Trump and is forthcoming in The BreakBeats Poets Volume 4: LatiNEXT. Follow her work on Instagram @elisabetvelasquezpoetry

GIRLS NIGHT by Elisabet Velasquez

Monday, 11 November 2019 by Elisabet Velasquez


After I gave him my dented hands which in any case were still valuable
                                                                                      
in the way that ruins can be,
   
I leave him for myself.
 
 
I spin-drunk en la sala, a spiraling summer,
I talk to my homegirls in the language of tomorrow –
                  
girl, finally.                               I invite them to die with me
at the club.

I pick a man to wine into, until the dance is an interrogation. The last man was loving me wrong. My
hands crawl close enough to his face to feel his breath the moment right before he regrets me. You know
how ya’ll do, love a girl only when she is the brightest version of her pain. The way a shadow loves the
pavement only when the sun shines. Have you ever been the shadow? I mean have you splayed your body
so flat against a woman that you didn’t notice she was concrete? I dance for him the way worms dance in
honor of devouring a body.

My homegirls laugh until they are ghosts.

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  • Published in Issue 16, Poetry, Uncategorized
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