Guillermo Filice Castro
Ode to Discarded Gloves
Praise you, teal ones, clear ones, pink ones. Thin mediators between us & the myriad of things trying to kill us. It’s always just one of you I spot, unpaired & impaired. A mother’s abandoned slap. Hand without jazz. Condom without jizz deflated in the grass like a jettisoned teenage memory, mourned by sneezeweed. More endearing than face masks, your domed cousins from the country of Mouth & Nose. Ubiquitous jelly fish, mangled on supermarket parking lots, half of your tentacles still stuck inside you. Haven’t we all felt this way—translucent, cast aside? Dressed in the latest latex or vinyl (praise you!) for one final wave.
—Submitted on 05/28/2020
Guillermo Filice Castro is the author of Mixtape for a War (Seven Kitchens Press, 2018) and Agua, Fuego (Finishing Line Press, 2015). His work appears in HIV Here and Now, The Normal School, Fugue, Columbia Poetry Review, Court Green, and other journals. He’s the recipient of an Emerge–Surface–Be Fellowship from the Poetry Project in New York. An immigrant from Argentina, Castro resides in New Jersey with his partner and two cats.
SUBMIT to What Rough Beast via our SUBMITTABLE site.
If you enjoyed today’s poem and you value What Rough Beast, consider making a donation to Indolent Books, a nonprofit poetry press.