Doubt
Nina C. Peláez
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At the cattle farm, I fell in love with a boy
who thought he was a god. I too, believed
this sometimes. Like the morning he jumped
into the pen with the biggest bull and nothing
came of it. Sometimes, I believed he loved me
too. In the way I thought that God might love.
Which is to say, from a distance, or through
small gestures: the dusty fist of thistle he snatched
me from the path or how he hauled a mattress
from the big house to where the workers slept—
clapboard chipped and mossy, floors beneath
our bare feet soft with sag.
In the sweltering upstairs, we found the room
black with crumpled husks of dying flies
and when the boy told me to find a broom, I did
as I was told, sweeping the menacing confetti
of them, thick and twitching on the floor.
We laid the wilted mattress by the window
where, that night, I tried to turn away
from the man next door watching us have sex:
our scrawny bodies suntanned, sticky
with lake mud and sweat. Let him look,
he said, pushing harder against me then,
laughing through his perfect teeth.
For so long, I tried to write about that time.
Describing so tenderly the wildflowers
and the lake, the deer along the path
we passed each day, glassy eyes still gazing
upward to an empty sky. Exit wound blistering
her velvet neck. For so long, I was dumb
with devotion. It was much later I learned:
when flies get stuck inside a house,
it isn’t starvation that kills them.
It’s the stress of believing there’s no way out.
AUDIO
Listen to Nina C. Peláez read “Doubt.”
About this poem: I started working on this piece over 15 years ago, while staying at a friend’s family farm one summer, and it has moved through many, many iterations. It was first fragments, then a series of short poems, and at one point, a short story that I abandoned when a teacher’s response was “the writing is beautiful, but stories are about people in trouble.” Yet, something kept pulling me back to these memories time and again. It took me this long to come to see what I was really writing about, to see the shadows that had been sitting in the periphery of that landscape all along.
This poem was selected as the runner-up of the Sita Martin Prize for Shō No. 7.
Read about the Sita Martin Prize for emerging poets here, or view past recipients and honorees.
Nina C. Peláez (www.ninapelaez.com) is a poet, essayist and educator based in Maui, HI where she works as Associate Director for The Merwin Conservancy. An adoptee and daughter of a Cuban exile, she was born in Las Vegas, Nevada and raised in Brooklyn, NY. A Best New Poets nominee, recent work appears or is forthcoming in journals including Prairie Schooner, Narrative, Rattle, Electric Literature, Willow Springs, Waxwing, diode, Pleiades, Swamp Pink, Only Poems & Verse Daily, among others. She was recently awarded the Walt Whitman Birthplace Association/ Gwenn A. Nusbaum Scholarship, a Barbara Deming Memorial Fund Grant, and the Coniston Prize by Radar Poetry, judged by January Gill O’Neil, and her work has been supported with scholarships and fellowships from Yaddo, Tupelo Press, Key West Literary Seminars, and the Association of Writers and Writing Programs, among others. She holds an MFA in Poetry from Bennington College where she is a 2025 Alumni Teaching Fellow. She is working on her first book. Find her on social media @ninacpelaez.
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