In honor of National Poetry Month, espnW is running a weekly poem on influential female athletes and women in sports.
--Chicago, IL
When I am a stranger to my own
ruin, twilight reminds me
to give alms to my best sins.
March: the city is purging
in the humility of worms, salt
washing from the grasses.
When I breathe in, I say thank you.
When I breathe out, I say gone,
I say garden, I say guns.
Three crows devour the dead
rat. Look at all that booty,
the man mutters and blows
me kisses. The sky is worthless
and my bulbous ass is always
a dinner bell. I run farther,
I run with a feather inside
my ear, I run from a bird
with a broken neck and follow
the sound of thawing snow.
Aren't we all boundless
though? The way a dream
secretes the morning after,
the way moths feed on the eyes
of fawn. Two and not two--
vines that strangle trees never
say they're sorry. I reach
the lake with this grateful
ache in my throat. If I say
my body is its own crumbling
country, if I say I am always
my own home--then
what does that make me?
Erika L. Sánchez is a poet, essayist, and fiction writer. She is the author of Lessons on Expulsion (Graywolf 2017) and Brown Girl Problems (Knopf 2017). Her nonfiction has appeared in Al Jazeera, The Guardian, Rolling Stone, and many other publications. She has received a CantoMundo Fellowship, a "Discovery"/Boston Review Poetry Prize, and a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation.