Margarita Pintado Burgos: California Poets Part 11, Five Poems

Margarita Pintado Burgos

October 20th, 2026

California Poets: Part XI

Margarita Pintado Burgos

Five Poems

SEPHORA

“You’re still fine,” the woman at Sephora tells me.

“But just you wait.” Her lips are perfectly lined,

a shade of peach applied with so much devotion.

“You’ll see how, in a few years, once hormones

abandon you, gradually, you’ll start losing your shine:

sooner or later, I’m telling you, everything withers.”

The woman at Sephora gives me a piercing stare.

Her trained eye tries to guess my age.

“43”

I say, before she plucks up the courage to ask.

She says yes with a nod, as if it were a sign of

approval, but warns me to make haste with the use

of certain products. “You’re still fine,” she insists,

“but it’s the responsible thing to act now.”

She turns to grab the magic potion that’s on offer.

She holds it as if it were a baby and proceeds

to demonstrate its application. She’s especially

mindful of the neck, a “danger zone”

which women, according to her, tend to ignore.

“The neck is crucial because it reveals your age.”

I look past her entrancing velvety lips, beyond

the Sephora’s fake lights, I look for a glimmer,

look for the blue … I find a more generous glare.

Outside, a seagull fights against the wind, its body

so light, spinning before the hazy vastness.

I tell the woman at Sephora that I’ve got

dehydrated skin because I’m from an island.

Resolutely, I explain how my skin is still

from an island. How after almost twenty years

this skin will not assimilate.

Like a soldier coming home from the war, I

show her my wounds: all the dryness that’s built up

on my arms, on my legs, on my TONGUE.

I say it like this so that she understands me.

I say it like this so that she can help me understand

what it is I’m looking for at the Sephora.

Now the woman softens up. She lets go of the moisturizer

that might change my life and for the first time, she

looks at me. Behind her fake lashes, I see her nearing

my false shore. Cast away from this and that, the woman

at Sephora doesn’t want to talk about beauty products

anymore, now she wants me to be the one to sell her

some products of my island memory. But I have nothing

to offer. Something inside me dries up and I simply

stare at her, bewildered.

I’ve just had enough of fantasies and products that won’t

change anything. Outside, the seagull lands, clumsily,

in the middle of a group of pigeons.

Suddenly, I sense my image being ripped to shreds

somewhere. As if someone unravels me, the mask slides off

and I’m killed by the real. I head out with my dry

and empty hands, while I try to forget all this nonsense,

all the wind I wind up to make way for my soaring

and shameless POETRY.

I can’t do it. Not much gets done these days.  

ONE THING AT A TIME

The body boils, the body in movement

takes up everything.

Ideas practically disappear.

Milo and Nina play around me.

In the background, I can hear a cumbia I like.

Sweat feels good.

Everything slides, except thoughts.

Something light pays me a visit, it’s as if I float,

even though I feel every muscle

hardening, like hot stones

deep inside.

They like seeing me like this, an active mom,

imitating the woman on screen.

They squat and jump around, too,

going up and down.

Sometimes they ask questions I answer

with dry one-word sentences while I learn

to breathe and exhale,

through the nose and mouth, as it should be,

alternating between contraction and expansion.

While I try to maintain that balance, I remember

the call I had with my mother this morning,

her voice saying the words:

“One thing at a time, Margarita.”

CUT

The woman takes out five pairs of scissors

and places them in front of me. She looks at my face

and then the scissors. She gets closer. Feels my hair.

Feels the scissors. She moves without making a sound.

I admire her style, the dedication to her profession. 

I owe to her the mystery, the drama inviting exquisite

attention. 

I give her absolute authority. She tells me,

“You have some waves you should showcase.” 

I tell her, “Go ahead.” Now she looks at the scissors 

and then looks at me. She picks out the sharpest pair, 

the shears. I get excited. With my hair still dry.

First time I get a haircut with my hair dry. I like how she

doesn’t explain things to me. She holds me tight

and starts to cut. She tells me just before “Close your eyes”

because I might be shocked, but I reply, “I love to watch.”

The woman smiles, lets go of the scissors and opts 

for a razor instead. 

The woman next to me is getting her hair dyed.

She’s an older woman whom I hear saying,

“Don’t worry too much honey, after a certain age,

a woman becomes invisible. And you know what?

It’s not that bad.” I’m scared by that prospect

of invisibility. But the razor’s return brings with it

a kind of peace. My helpless hair falls like a silent crying,

bidding farewell to my being. I feel a weight has been lifted.

I want this cut to be the beginning of something.

After the five pairs of scissors and the razor, the woman

is finished and feels satisfied. What I think doesn’t matter. 

Outside the wind dishevels my hair, but this cut, 

said the woman, was made for me to remain intact

once the gust sweeps in. I walk through the parking lot

as if I were the only person in the world, bent,

for the moment, on not disappearing.

WHATSAPP

I send him a photo of the sea. 

It’s cloudy, and that sharpens the weak glimmer

emanating from the wet hearth that rests

under the tight sky, facing the sudden green

of the grass that now emerges, confident

and cautious in the foreground. The image

is accompanied by a message:

This is what I see on a daily basis, and I still 

complain.

The sun is inside, he replies, decided and kind. 

The truth is that it’s cloudy on the inside

and outside. I admit I feel weak before 

such weather. He tells me, as if to console me,

as if to let me know that I’ve never been alone,

that the poet Dylan Thomas used to write about

the weather of the soul. I smile and reply

with a heart. And that’s how we enter

the poem together. 

Do you feel the gray inside of you? That 

gray that moves like a manta ray.

I’m mesmerized by that image. I think

to rustle the manta ray until it frees up

a new color. 

Because I need a happy ending, and he knows it:

I intend to feel, through such a stubborn enterprise,

that light which is also forged in the darkness.

A GOOD DAY

A Guillermo

Today was a good day. I stayed in bed longer than usual

decidedly focused on absolutely nothing. I let the first light

slip over my warm body, I thought about the book I swore

I would write; I considered the unusual need of not writing it.

Behind me a branch moved, a branch received the song

of a Hooded Oriole, name of that little black-headed orange

bird that abounds here. I sang too, on my way to the kitchen,

I sang, while the water boiled. The sounds of the morning

are always so close, one can almost grab them. The sounds

of the night, though, come from afar, spectral and remote,

like the howl of the coyote which seems to come from

every corner, which is like coming from nowhere.

After coffee and these thoughts, I went out to the garden

wrapped in a cloud of smoke and mystery, wanting to feel

mystical, but not too much, in ectasis as I am for the things

of this world. I greeted my neighbor’s yellow dogs. Some

days (like today) they come, playful and loving, but others

they bark at me, turn me into a stranger.

Then, I did some yoga, I stretched out under a sun still weak

at that hour. Once I finished, I came back to a long poem

by Robert Hass that I had started in the kitchen while the water

boiled. I evoked the man who gave me the book, I considered

sending him a picture of me reading the book, naked on the blue

yoga mat, or dressed under a lemon tree that I think resembles

the cover of the book. I pondered returning to the bedroom,

get in bed, record me doing the things I want him doing to me,

like reading one of the poems by Hass, or one of his, for example.

All poems originally written in Spanish and translated into English by Alejandra Quintana Arocho, except the last one, A Good Day, translated by the author.

Author Bio:

Margarita Pintado Burgos is a Puerto Rican poet, the author of four full-length poetry collections, including Una muchacha que se parece a mí/ A Girl Who Looks Like Me, for which she won the 2015 Institute of Puerto Rican Culture Poetry Prize, and Ojo en celo/ Eye in Heat, winner of the 2023 Ambroggio Prize, from The Academy of American Poets. In 2022 she received the Letras Boricuas Fellowship, from the Mellon Foundation. Her book La isla se achica/ The Island Shrinks won the 2025 Institute of Puerto Rican Culture Poetry Prize and is forthcoming spring 2027. Pintado Burgos earned her PhD in Spanish from Emory University and is a professor of language, literature and creative writing in Point Loma Nazarene University, in San Diego. Since 2021, she directs the poetry website Distropika.