Yolanda Arroyo Pizarro, “Tamarind”
Author: Poetry Editor
March 13, 2012
This week, a new poem by Yolanda Arroyo Pizarro.
TAMARIND
When you take a tamarind with the tips of the fingers, hand open, and you remove the shell and place it in the crotch, and lick it, suck it, push the tongue, taste and remove the pulp from the seed to nibble, piece by piece, and pressed against the walls of lumpy skin, raised, swollen and pink, a bit muddy, and promises with closed eyes to caress the soul, deeply, and guarantee to come to redeem any past experience, get nearer to heal, and place a Band-Aid in the heart, then say with your lips in my bitten lips, pegadita a la boca that “you are my everything”, and promise the best nights, the finest days, and then you play with the rolls of my negra afro hair and bite my back, and draw me jiquis mark in my breasts, and you stamp a cardinal in the neck because your hand has closed on my décolletage, and I whisper the name, that important name as you dance my hips, and I dance the pelvis while the juices will spill all my cracks, todas mis hendijas, and the mass is near over, is almost end, fruity scarce bone, you jab and poke, and charge with your hips my hips, and swear to keep jabbing well, as long as you pierce my lower lip and penetrates one, two, three fingers and open my valleys, all of them, and mingle all the sour flavors, more bitter, sometimes sweet, sugary, syrupy and then this woman stretches and inclines, and play embestirte and she comes, then, and only then, is the time when you truly have experienced the flavor of the tamarindo.
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YOLANDA ARROYO PIZARRO is the author of Caparazones (2010), the first lesbian fiction novel written in Puerto Rico, published by Editorial Egales in Spain, and the editor of the anthology Cachaperismos, the first Puerto Rican lesbian anthology on the island. She won the National Institute of Puerto Rican Literature Prize in 2008, the Woman Latino Writer Award Residency from the National Hispanic Culture Center in Albuquerque in 2011, and the PEN Club Prize in 2010 and 2006. Her work has been translated to French, Italian and Hungarian.
