Seriously Funny
{A Bumbershoot Special Feature}


Enriqueta Carrington

is a Mexican-English writer-mathematician, transplanted by fate or happenstance to the US. Her poetry in Spanish and English has appeared in Pedestal Magazine, Carnelian, and the US1 Worksheets.

Her poetry translations have appeared in Rattapallax and A Gathering of the Tribes. She is the translator of the anthology Treasury of Mexican Love Poems, Quotations & Proverbs and of the poem collection Samandar, Book of Travels, by Lourdes Vázquez.

She teaches mathematics at Rutgers University.


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Another Woman’s Garden

Azure afternoons, just before the fall,
although my aunt would rant and scream and hiss,
my childish self would always steal her figs.
Sweet is the fruit that grows beyond a wall.

Is it next day, or the following week?
Again I hear the sinful call—it’s wrong.
The spirit is willing, the flesh is strong,
though I was always taught to say it’s weak.

For feasts in my past I ask no pardon.
At last, for love’s own sake, I want to leave
the fruit untouched on other women’s trees,
I tend the sweetest in my own garden.

But in my chaster age do I regret
the figs I stole or those I’ll never get?



 
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