Susan Michele Coronel

Susan Michele Coronel lives in New York City. Her first full-length collection, In the Needle, A Woman, won the 2024 Donna Wolf Palacio Poetry Prize, and is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals including MOM Egg Review, Redivider, One Art, North Dakota Quarterly, Anti-Heroin Chic, and Thimble. In 2023, she won the Massachusetts Poetry Festival’s First Poem Award, and her work has received two Pushcart nominations. Ms. Coronel holds an M.S. Ed in Applied Linguistics from the City University of New York (Queens College) and a B.A. in English from Indiana-University Bloomington.

Submerged

When I wake I’m wearing pajamas covered with
tiny yellow birds & one bird is upside down, swaddled
in a blanket. I wish I could inherit the upside-down bird’s
sense of composure in a flattened world, learn to swallow
the depths of a pool, even if muddled, & never vanish.
I learned early on that vanity is like vanishing, creating
a replacement for yourself so you can forget who you
really are. I know myself well, flaws & all, but most
of the time it hurts, my hair blown back like abalone
& shocked sea wrack. In my 20s a doctor with an office
in a private house diagnosed me with anemia. His soiled
hands rifled through stacks of manila file folders & medical
reports on his desk, tainted by rust & dried blood. I was
terrified of the diagnosis, more because of the anticipation
& the heaviness of the word, but all it meant was more spinach
& checking vitamin labels, a kind of piecemealing neither
here nor there, but it air-dried me, forced me to reassess.
On the lawn I blow a blade of grass between my fingers
to hear a whistle, then pretend I’m sleeping at sea, my pillow
an oyster shell, my blanket a wrapper sewn with seaweed
& anemone, a double dish of moon floating under waves.