A poem by award-winning poet Ana Maria Caballero. Caballero's writing has won the Beverly International Prize for Literature, Colombia's José Miguel Arango National Poetry Prize + been a finalist for the Academy of American Poets Prize.

Her NFTs are available via Fort Gallery NFT, MONOGRAMA NFT Gallery, Async.Art, Foundation, Etherpoems, HEN.

anamariacaballero.com

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"Litany in D Minor" is part of Blue Prints, a closed collection of five poems that subtly responds to the concept of a "roadmap" vis à vis the creative process. Rather than asking where art may lead, Caballero invites readers to consider where art comes from by sharing her own poetic practice.

The media-rich poems in Caballero's Blue Prints collection are linked graphically but also thematically. Each poem approaches the question of what drives literary creation from a different perspective, but, in all, the inevitability of the process is palpable.

For Caballero, writing is not a matter of choice or of destination--instead, writing is her blueprint, at once the origin, essence and design of her being.

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Litany in D Minor

In the bedroom of my midlife, I summon god each night.

What god?

How it feels: my skin shrinks from air, wishing to recede into another realm,

but I cannot know what it means.

I have no say in the way I arrive, night after night,

to beg of this screen an answer to offer to that factual world of other,

as justification, yes, but also— so god is my witness—

as gift.