Paige Quiñones
Paige Quiñones is is the author of The Best Prey, winner of the 2020 Pleiades Press Lena Miles-Wever Todd Prize for Poetry. She has received awards and fellowships from the Center for Mexican-American Studies, the Academy of American Poets, and Inprint Houston. Her work has appeared in Best New Poets, Copper Nickel, Crazyhorse, Juked, Lambda Literary, Orion Magazine, Poetry Northwest, Quarterly West, Sixth Finch, and elsewhere. She earned her MFA from the Ohio State University and is currently a PhD student in poetry at the University of Houston.
Visit her online at www.paigequinones.com
"Lineage" from Winter Tangerine Winter 2017
Lineage
One of my fathers played stickball in Harlem.
This one never got a street-kid nickname.
Another scared well-dressed ladies into
crossing the street before he crossed their paths.
I’m told it was his boots or his brown skin.
A different father found friends stair-slackened:
addicts a boy couldn’t turn his gaze from.
One found god and never loved anyone.
Another played a dented sax, its keys
rusted pearly green underneath the pads.
#6 had his name called to enlist--
he didn’t like that one bit. Another
kept a baby boy in tow. My favorite
stood before the wild and never came back.
Recommended Books for Aspiring Writers
Visit her online at www.paigequinones.com
"Lineage" from Winter Tangerine Winter 2017
Lineage
One of my fathers played stickball in Harlem.
This one never got a street-kid nickname.
Another scared well-dressed ladies into
crossing the street before he crossed their paths.
I’m told it was his boots or his brown skin.
A different father found friends stair-slackened:
addicts a boy couldn’t turn his gaze from.
One found god and never loved anyone.
Another played a dented sax, its keys
rusted pearly green underneath the pads.
#6 had his name called to enlist--
he didn’t like that one bit. Another
kept a baby boy in tow. My favorite
stood before the wild and never came back.
Recommended Books for Aspiring Writers
- Ordinary Genius by Kim Addonizio
- The Making of a Story by Alice LaPlante
- Madness, Rack, and Honey by Mary Ruefle
- Eros, the Bittersweet by Anne Carson
- The Mixquiahuala Letters by Ana Castillo