Diannely Antigua

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Diannely Antigua 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. She received her BA in English from the University of Massachusetts Lowell where she won the Jack Kerouac Creative Writing Scholarship; and received her MFA at NYU where she was awarded a Global Research Initiative Fellowship to Florence, Italy. She is the recipient of additional fellowships from CantoMundo, Community of Writers, Fine Arts Work Center Summer Program, and was a finalist for the 2021 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and chosen for the Best of the Net Anthology. Her poems can be found in Poem-a-Day, Poetry Magazine, The American Poetry Review, Washington Square Review, The Adroit Journal, and elsewhere. She resides in Portsmouth, NH, where she is the Poet Laureate. Source

Diary Entry #4: Ghazal

Then I did something

I didn’t think I could do. Dear God,

 

I thought about suicide, then my algebra homework,

then maybe something else godly,

 

how I was going to fast

and pray for a language to explain last Wednesday. I’m no god

 

but I’m trying to dust off the ashes

of the change. I got my period and I feel less godlike,

 

an unclean romance in my body, how I cupped

my hands to catch whatever came, little bit of God’s

 

blood escaping my vagina, or how

the idea of cutting a wrist might lead to more goddess.

 

Dr. Rosenbloom says I need a counselor, says

I am officially broken, that I will pick up a knife to cut the god-

 

spell out of me. I tell him there’s a mouth in my underwear wadded with tissue.

It sings beautiful things when it’s touched. It sings oh god.

Published:

2019

Length:

Regular

Literary Movements:

Contemporary

Anthology Years:

2023

Themes:

Faith & Hope

Identity

Mental Health

Womanhood

Literary Devices:

Enjambment

a line break interrupting the middle of a phrase which continues on to the next line

Ghazal

a short, lyrical poem that have five to 15 couplets, each one ending with the same word. Ghazals were originally used by Persian poets in Arabic verse.

Imagery

visually descriptive or figurative language, especially in a literary work

Metaphor

a comparison between two unrelated things through a shared characteristic