Poetry by Miriam Sabrina Taveras
Your Prescription Sonnet
I wish Walgreens felt not the same as
an immigration office. Sliding doors scrape bone —
raw-skinned mice tearing my father’s tendons.
Icy Hot, Tylenol, Nyquil, and each soot-less hand,
insured leg. The cashier plays along to a fake prescription
from a doctorless bony girl, needs vitamins.
Velcro back braces mold spines crooked at the root,
stitched like a clipped cockatiel plucking iron strings.
Why must I feel like I owe the white man
my breath when my father never comes home
limping the same, hauling five heads on one neck?
Each time I return to the photo booth for passport
pictures, I try to hold my chin cocked and still
and say it’s Taveras, with “v” as in victor.
Floridian Iguana
At my father’s side, I sneak
below the window screen —
listen for the clicks and pumps
of plastic-loaded guns. Rustling
follows the clank of their triggers
echoing from both sides of the lake,
and I rise by the black barrel
of my father’s air rifle and taste
the sharp remnants of the victim’s ache.
They are pests, he says.
I watch my father’s sweaty back
back away, back to his perch
and I bend by a long body of scales
and spines and copper and steel.
Her claws open wide to the sky as gray
replaces her greens and ash kisses
her skin and I watch her freeze —
a granite sculpture for the cruelest of men.
Like a phoenix, she expires
in her own cinders.
My neighbor grabs at her motionless tail,
pulls her into the lake and I see little drops
of blood and droppings stain the grass where she stood.
I want to tell him, your pellets didn’t bounce, they are
too sharp, they are only meant to run away, she was afraid —
her splash springs over his knees and he draws
his cannon close, turning his back to the edge.
They are pests, he says. I ignore him.
I plunge her likeness into the deep,
her arms outstretched and like a Christ
of the abyss she reaches for her beloved
sun filtering through the tides.
Miriam Sabrina Taveras is an undergraduate island girl from the Dominican Republic studying at the University of Central Florida. She is pursuing a bachelor’s degree in Creative Writing, along with a certificate in Editing and Publishing. Her nonfiction and poetry pieces have appeared in Panku Literary & Arts Magazine and Cypress Dome Magazine. She lives in Fort Lauderdale with her family.
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