Women who switch roles
Let’s say that for a change
you are the island
and I’m the deep sea
snatching your reefs
And let’s say I am the bear
You, the helpless tourist
mauled with camera still rolling
And let’s say, for once,
I’m the spectator
and that you’re spinning your wheels
going nowhere
Why, you should’ve just asked!
If it’s all the same to you,
let’s do it that way this time.
*
Ars Poetica for when you don’t recognize yourself
After The Castle by Jorge Méndez Blake
The computer is making sure it’s you.
Your phone won’t unlock;
fingerprints scrubbed out from
hugging yourself all night. You ask me
whether everybody else is having this life,
whether it needs to be so brambly.
I self-sabotage, amateur another
bowl of my anxiety.
The texts we choose
to consume, to translate,
dark our telltales.
There is a squeak in the wheel,
a pea under a pile of mattresses,
a book that rewrites the wall.
Some of us live in two
languages, dreams, tongues,
thoughts split. Another year,
I will speak to you in Italian,
you say yes, yes, let’s speak.
Let’s loosen our tongues and
our waistbands. Let’s stop
giving a shit. In one moment
I brick the balance.
In the next, I disrupt the book
and slip the rules.
*
Miriam Calleja is a Pushcart-nominated poet, writer, workshop leader, artist, and translator. Her work has appeared in platform review, Odyssey, Taos Journal, plume, Modern Poetry in Translation, humana obscura, and elsewhere. She has published 2 full collections and several chapbooks and collaborations. Her latest chapbook is titled Come Closer, I Don’t Mind the Silence (BottleCap Press, 2023). Her first translated work was published in 2025 and is titled Variations on Silence (Nadia Mifsud, PoetryWala). Miriam is from Malta and lives in Birmingham, Alabama. She is co-editor at Brick Road Poetry Press and table // FEAST. Read more on miriamcalleja.com.
