I’M ALMOST 30
and give a good blow job but can’t
open a bottle of wine without breaking
the cork. I’m almost 30 and
in my nightmare all of my exes
are meeting for coffee, like an unlikely family
of missed orgasms, and I want to say
I’m almost 30 and 30 other women
and I wait in line to pee at a Backstreet Boys concert.
And afterward we all want the same thing, we all want
to fuck a Backstreet Boy tonight. Dear
god, I’m almost 30 and I’m lost
in a funny thing, like looking so beautiful
while the light of the streetlamp falls
perfectly on my skin, and I’ve survived, or how
my mother’s friend who visited me in the hospital each time
is dying of cancer while I run in the street,
my lover chasing me barefoot because
I’m drunk again. So he takes the keys, so he pulls me
inside, and I pretend to sleep on the couch, sneak
out when I hear him snoring, drive
down Main Street with Klonopin
and gin in my belly, and my eyes
are almost 30, blurry with unexpected
sanity like when the guest at the restaurant
touched my arm as she left, handing me the bill, saying
I can’t believe you’re almost 30 and
with a green speck of nori still stuck in her teeth
she smiled, told me I was a good
waitress, that my energy was warm, and I cried
as I bussed the table, because I’m almost 30
and I have so much sin left to live, and more weeks
to leave blood stains on a mattress, when really
I just want to roll up to every funeral like I own it,
sexy to meet Jesus in a white dress, the runs in my nylons
all fixed with nail polish, and I’m almost 30
and the people in this town
like to watch the piping plovers on the beach,
their orange feet skittering across the shoreline
like a joy I don’t understand, as if
the vastness of the Atlantic wasn’t the backdrop,
as if the water couldn’t claim
a tiny body for itself,
swallow it whole.
Diannely Antigua (@nellfell13) is a Dominican American poet and educator, born and raised in Massachusetts. Her debut collection Ugly Music (YesYes Books, 2019) was the winner of the Pamet River Prize and a 2020 Whiting Award. A graduate of the MFA program at NYU, she was awarded a Global Research Initiative Fellowship to Florence, Italy. She is the recipient of additional fellowships from CantoMundo, Community of Writers, and the Fine Arts Work Center Summer Program. Her poems can be found in Washington Square Review, Bennington Review, and The Adroit Journal. Her heart is in Brooklyn.