"Black Lead in a Nancy Meyers Film" by Rio Cortez

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March 22, 2022 

Black Lead in a Nancy Meyers Film

Rio Cortez

Aging, at all. I want that. And to fall
perhaps most honestly in love
beside the ocean, in a home I’ve paid
for by doing as I like: drinking good
wine, dusting sugar over a croissant, or
the stage play I’m writing myself into.
Aging Black woman in neutral summer
turtleneck. Known. And jogging. Lonesome
enough. Eating homemade lavender
ice cream, the moon blooming
through the kitchen window. The distant
sound of waves. Learning
French as a second language.
Votre pâte merveilleux, I smile back.
And then, just like that! Falling, cautiously,
for my busy, middle-aged lover,
who needs me, but has never truly seen me
until now. Our Black friends, celebrating
with hors d’oeuvres. Our Black children
growing older.

Copyright © 2022 by Rio Cortez. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on March 22, 2022, by the Academy of American Poets.

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“I enjoy rewatching films that Nancy Meyers has written and directed: the beautiful interior designs, the dream jobs, the tiny refinements and subtle details of wealth, the refreshingly middle-aged romantic protagonists. I wanted to imagine what it might look like if one of those protagonists were a Black woman. We rarely see Black women in film depicted in a state of aging. Through irony, and the delicious process of rewriting Black women into rooms of popular culture that have been closed to them, this sonnet also explores questions of Black motherhood, comfort, and the potential of a life uninterrupted.”
—Rio Cortez

Rio Cortez is an Afro Latinx poet and the author of Golden Ax, forthcoming in 2022 from Penguin Books, as well as The ABCs of Black History (Workman, 2020). Originally from Salt Lake City, she currently lives in Harlem, New York.
Golden Ax
(Penguin Books, 2022)


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Thanks to Brenda Shaughnessy, author of The Octopus Museum: Poems (Knopf, 2021), who curated Poem-a-Day for this month’s weekdays. Listen to a Q&A about Shaughnessy’s curatorial approach and find out more about our guest editors for the year.
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