Dear Poem, M. Soledad Caballero

You will not come. You refuse. You will not elucidate God or love,

The tendril vines and shapes of marriage, illness, the Oscar nominees.

You are silent, a cracked, yellow shell. I trust you for something,

anything. I want you to be curse and mantra. Instead, you sit heavy.

You do not forget. You just do not reveal. An elephant in mud.

This is what madness must be. To spend the days stuck in front

of white spaces, imagining color. You demand worship and work.

You are a wicked queen with red lips and an apple, ready to kill.

M. SOLEDAD CABALLERO teaches at Allegheny College. A 2017 Canto- Mundo fellow, she has published poems in The Missouri Review, Mississippi Review, Iron Horse Literary Review, Memorius, Crab Orchard Review, Anomaly, and other venues. Caballero writes that she thinks about poems cracking and splitting open all the time: “For me, at least, there has to be a break in my idea, both to let some light in and also to do something with other pieces that might not have existed before. When I saw the cracked egg on the floor in the IHLR photo prompt, I saw what writer’s block and this idea of cracking might do together in my poems. There are so many ways to approach writing, but sometimes I think one of my ways is to see how things are not able to be put together as I originally imagined. Sometimes that reality is amazing and a delight, but sometimes it’s like the egg on the floor, which cannot be made into anything else but the thing itself cracked on the floor. Poems can be incredibly annoying because they are not always easy. They play pranks—or at least that’s what it feels like when I have writer’s block. ‘Dear Poem’ was a way for me to write through my frustration at those moments when the writing isn’t working and, still, the next day or week, I’ll have to try again, even when there’s still the chance the whole thing might just crack apart.”