Jenna Martínez – Local Author

Jenna Martínez is a queer Mexican-American femme writer and printmaker from San Antonio, Texas. Her writing has appeared in or is forthcoming in The Kenyon Review, Homology Lit, and One Page Poetry, and she is one of Literary Cleveland’s 2023-2024 Breakthrough Writing Residents. Kristin will be presenting at Literary Cleveland’s Inkubator Writing Conference at the downtown Cleveland Public Library on September 20-21.


Skinny Dipping at the People’s Beach
Brooklyn, New York

City summer sun and piss leak out of the subway walls
and concrete. Heat eats the city in gulps.
We take the Q to the soft rim of continent.
Our clothes drop in the sand without a sound.
Water so cold, like it doesn’t fit in the arms of summer.
Up to our necks, the water barely ripples,
biting out any heat I can remember.
On our first date, you say, I think I can worship you.
I tell you about Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera
how they lived in two separate houses
connected by a bridge. You make me
paper houses, Frida’s is azul all over,
Diego’s orange on the sides. I transplant them
out of Mexico, stick them in the sand.
I run from the Atlantic, my feet collecting shoreline
trash. I watch you emerge from the water. You look
magnificent. I think maybe we could be like this:
you and your partner, me and mine
the two of us a bridge in the middle.


Copyright © 2024 by Jenna Martinez. Used by permission of the author.

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