Yesenia Montilla

cantfindit

Yesenia Montilla is an Afro-Latina poet & a daughter of immigrants. Her poetry has appeared in the Chapbook For the Crowns of Your Head, as well as the literary journals The Gulf Coast, Prairie Schooner, Pittsburgh Poetry Review & others. She received her MFA from Drew University in Poetry and Poetry in Translation & is a 2014 CantoMundo Fellow. Her first collection The Pink Box is published by Willow Books & was Longlisted for a PEN award in 2016. She lives in Harlem NY. Source

Ode to a Dominican Breakfast

Keep your pancakes, french toast, eggs

benedict, your muffins and scones

 

Keep your waffles and four types of syrup

the way your eggs scramble but never sizzle

 

Nothing more scrumptious than mangu con queso frito

 

The other day I wore a white dress

with a wide skirt and a red sash

 

I danced merengue barefoot on my stoop. I kissed the

Dominican flag, once for each time I remembered a taino word

 

yuca, batata, tanama, ocama, yautia, cacique, juracan,

every bite on the plate, every morsel like a bachata tune

 

This can all be yours, get off the long lines at the brunch spot

Forget the grits and cheesy okra. Ring my doorbell

 

Five ingredients: Olive oil, onions, plantain, white cheese and flour

Published:

2016

Length:

Regular

Literary Movements:

Contemporary

Anthology Years:

2021

2023

Themes:

Agency

Bilingual

Food

Identity

Intersectionality & Culture

LGBTQ+ Experience

Literary Devices:

Anaphora

a figure of speech in which words repeat at the beginning of successive clauses, phrases, or sentences

Asyndeton

the absence of a conjunction (for, and, nor, but, or, yet, so…) between phrases and within a sentence

Ode

a lyric poem in the form of an address to a particular subject, often elevated in style or manner and written in varied or irregular meter