At church I sit alone, not readyfor the faith, luscious around me.Small building withthe smell of stale incenseand dark wood. Windowsthe color of wishes.Surrounded by saints and stories,my anger about God.I end up there on Sundaysto feel the way solitude feels.I wrestle God.Sing Stand KneelThe whole storyhunts me.Birth, life, fall,death life again.My mother arranges her entire bodyaround church, anchorshands mouth heart.She is certain, she knows his voice,a rising phoenix .
Agnostic at 47
M. Soledad Caballero
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“Agnostic at 47” from FLIGHT PLAN: by M. Soledad Caballero.
Published by Red Hen Press on September 2, 2025.
Copyright © 2025 by M. Soledad Caballero.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
M. Soledad Caballero is a Macondo, CantoMundo, and StoryKnife fellow. Her collection, I Was a Bell won the 2019 Benjamin Saltman poetry prize, was the 2022 International Association of Autoethnography and Narrative Inquiry book of the year, and a 2022 International Latino Book Award winner. Flight Plan, published in September 2025 was long-listed for the Julie Suk prize. Her work has been nominated for several Pushcart prizes and has appeared in the Missouri Review, the Iron Horse Review, the Ninth Letter Review, and other venues. She’s an avid tv watcher, a terrible birder, and teaches at Allegheny College.
FINALIST for the 2025 Julie Suk Award
Flight Plan charts the trajectories of bodies and birds, navigating the dynamic interplay of past, present, and what happens in the in-between. These lyrical poems map the aftermaths of cancer, the varied routes of migration, and the geographies of memory. They document stories of love and its legacies, personal, familial, and national. They reject reductive diagnoses and soar and hunt with birds of prey. In this inventive collection, cancer transforms the body, art ignites healing, and faith is a restless vexation. M. Soledad Caballero urges us to remember that women’s aging bodies are evocative, that disease is a hungry creature, and that the interstices of blood and flesh are universes teeming with possibility.
"M. Soledad Caballero’s Flight Plan is the compelling account of a ragged body in mid-flight to survival told through a cellular lyric. Caballero is a daughter who’s looking at the plot of history to 'find more than bones.' This stunning book is an elegy for the body before, an ode for the body after."
—Carmen Giménez
"Caballero masterfully uses visceral language and vivid imagery to hold space for both sorrow and hope, beauty and pain, the light and the dark, the water and the land. This much anticipated second book is a must-read for anyone living or experiencing life in the 'in between.'”
—Jasminne Mendez
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