Yesika Salgado

I hope you join me in celebrating our incredibly messy yet resilient hearts.

I am a woman who insists on loving love, who always finds a way back to herself, back to being whole. this book is for anyone who is all heart and not much else. if you fall easy. if you lose hard. if you are stubborn with your love.

the summers I wore my adolescence like a yoke / my heart as heavy as clay

I was afraid of everything / except the poems / they’ve always been here

my heart belonged to the ocean / before it found my body

every man I have loved does not know my country / has not been awakened by the roosters’ crow / does not know the swell of grass and dirt beneath June thunderstorms / does not smell burning wood and think of home

I learned to forgive before I learned to speak / to turn palms upward to God and my lover / to let a man ruin me with his love / to call the ruins sacred / to uproot everything and call the new place mine / to name the nostalgia something sweet / a ripened fruit growing out of a dying tree

this is what I know of love
the sweet mouthful
a messy thing
dissolving
in my hands
on my tongue
filling everything

the grief I left everywhere

all I am is mirrors / another name for this is poet