A poem by award-winning poet Ana Maria Caballero.
Caballero's writing has won the Beverly International Prize for Literature, Colombia's José Miguel Arango National Poetry Prize + been a finalist for the Academy of American Poets Prize.
Her digital art was exhibited at Dreamverse and was awarded a Sevens Foundation grant. Her NFTs are available via Fort Gallery NFT, MONOGRAMA NFT Gallery, Async.Art, Foundation, Etherpoems, HEN.
anamariacaballero.com
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THE NAPKIN TRICK is part of BLUE PRINTS, a closed collection of five poems that subtly responds to the concept of a "roadmap" vis à vis the creative process. Rather than asking where art may lead, Caballero invites readers to consider where art comes from by sharing her own poetic practice.
The media-rich poems in Caballero's BLUE PRINTS collection are linked graphically but also thematically. Each poem approaches the question of what drives literary creation from a different perspective, but, in all, inevitability is palpable.
For Caballero, writing is not a matter of choice or of destination--instead, writing is her blueprint, at once the origin, essence and design of her being.
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The Napkin Trick
It’s happened before:
the intention for conversation
starts with a deliberate walk
toward an animated block
with a light purse & empty pocket.
(The night, after all,
should only call for some cash.)
But when the bar is chosen,
you halt to study its doors.
Reluctance offers an option:
you hunt instead for isolated
drinks and a borrowed pen
with which to forget
the disco music from a car
(circling the block
in search of a parking spot)
on the front and back
of a red paper napkin.
