Sonnet for Ochún

After my left arm I washed my right, neck, décolletage,
and navel. I ate ground meat with large crystals of imported salt.
The women and men who would stroke my hair if I asked,
I thought of them fondly then sadly. At the flea market,
what I touched with a fingernail was a copper lamp, a mundane
painting of mountains, the cashier’s hum. I bought nothing I didn’t
want. In the cul-de-sac, I found clouds on leashes, loose roosters.
I thought thoughts ugly as clothespins. Reading a used book,
I suspected I knew less about death than the last person who held it.
I spat into a mirrored sink. I lost my slippers and face. To feel more
like water, I drank it. Before bed, I walked my plank of uncertainties
and plunged further into uncertainty. Am I capturing all of history
in this gesture? I shouted into the future. In the wet air of the future,
I could have but never appeared. No one was sorry but me.

Copyright © 2023 by Leslie Sainz. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on June 20, 2023, by the Academy of American Poets. 

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“This poem is part of a series of American sonnets written for and alongside las Siete Potencias Africanas that appears in my forthcoming debut, Have You Been Long Enough at Table. I wrote and rewrote this poem many times. Though I am most satisfied with this attempt, this project is a stranger to completion. Such is the nature of devotion.”
—Leslie Sainz