Ode to Your Wife, by Anjanette Delgado

Please thank your wife for me.

I remember her
turquoise silver wedding
ring stabbing the wind
an inch from my face.

What are you, fifteen?

She shook then. Lips
down-turned, skin sunken purple
brown around sleepless eyes.

Nineteen, I said—frozen—

from then on forever able to see the future.

Please thank her for me.
It was nice to see you.

(2018)

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Anjanette Delgado is an award-winning Puerto Rican novelist, speaker, and journalist who has written or produced for media outlets such as NBC, CNN, NPR, Univision, HBO and Vogue Magazine’s Latam and Mexico divisions, and for Telemundo, among others. She’s covered presidential coups, elections, the Olympics, both Iraq wars and the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Her human-interest television series “Madres en la Lejanía” won an Emmy award for its depiction of Latina mothers working as undocumented nannies in the United States, while living with the consequences of having left their own children behind in search of a better life. Her original screenplay for HBO, “Good in Bed,” was a thesis on the life moments in which sex, love, identity, self, and society collide.  Anjanette is the author of The Heartbreak Pill (Simon and Schuster’s Atria Books, 2008 and 2009) and The Clairvoyant of Calle Ocho (Kensington Publishing 2014 and Penguin Random House 2014).  She lives in Miami with her husband, Daniel, and her Mini Daschund, Chloe.