Dustin Brookshire​ & Caridad Moro-Gronlier
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Dustin Wants to Write a Poem with Caridad
                      After “Nicole Wants to Write a Poem with Maureen”

Dustin is writing this poem without his secret weapon—Kirkland brand Pinot Grigio from Costco.
Dustin is writing this poem hungry since he’s on another diet, but he swears he won’t get hangry. Dustin wants to know what Caridad is having for dinner.

Caridad means to tell Dustin she is having grilled chicken and spring mix for dinner, but it comes out as spring chicken and grilled mix. Caridad laughs at the gaffe because it sums up her youth when all she ate was grilled chicken and spring mix—in public, that is. Caridad sighs with resignation when she says, I got fat anyway.

When Dustin hears/reads/thinks the word fat, he thinks of Sordid Lives— how Bonnie Bedelia’s
character Latrelle removed the husky label from her son’s jeans, sewed on a slim label in its place. Dustin’s mother used to ask him, Do you want to be fat like your father’s mother? Then add
Don’t tell your father I said that.

Don’t tell your father, is what Caridad’s mother says when they slip into the Orange Julius at the mall for a midday pick-me-up teeming with all the sugar he doesn’t allow either of them to have. Caridad’s father monitors her mother’s weight and dress size which is why her mother bursts into tears when the maroon, size 8 slim-hipped polyester bell bottoms she’s been eyeing don’t fit her size 10, well hipped body. Don’t tell your father, she says later at home as Caridad watches her remove a size 8 tag from a Papi approved pair of pants and replace the size 10 tag on the new pair she brought home with it. It is painstaking work that requires tiny snips, a practiced stitch, a lie ever ready on the lips. Caridad never tells.
 
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Dustin Brookshire’s chapbooks include Never Picked First For Playtime (Harbor Editions, 2023), Love Most Of You Too (Harbor Editions, 2021), and To The One Who Raped Me (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2012). He is the co-editor of Let Me Say This: A Dolly Parton Poetry Anthology (Madville Publishing, 2023), which was named to the 2024 “Books All Georgians Should Read” list by the Georgia Center for the Book. 
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Caridad Moro-Gronlier is the author of Tortillera (TRP 2021), winner of The TRP Southern Poetry Breakthrough Series and the chapbook Visionware (FLP 2009). She is a Contributing Editor for Grabbed: Poets and Writers Respond to Sexual Assault (Beacon Press, 2020) and Associate Editor for SWWIM Every Day an online daily poetry journal.