Love Poem Ft. Apple Juice Inflation
In the 24-hour diner on Baltimore Avenue, we piss off our waitress by being the only people there. Forgive me, I want to tell her; I know you were probably looking for an easy shift, not two lesbians discussing their hear-me-out lists, and now you’re stuck listening to me justify why Ms. Potts from Beauty and the Beast would be a gentle and generous lover, (listen, she’s a woman who knows service and was built to steam things up) but there's a girl sitting across from me and I’m terribly in love with her. In love in the way that will ruin me, a little bit. The way delight broke into my life and refused to leave, claimed squatters rights and everything, and she’s still so new to me. Our relationship months old, still wrinkled, still can’t hold its head up, and from the outside, no stranger can see what went into this moment; how long it took the bruises to fall from my body the last time, a full harvest that couldn’t survive early frost, the years I spent believing there was nothing left in me to want. So yes, I’m going to let the hours spill one by one across the streaked and barely mopped floors. Nurse a Minute Maid Apple Juice another half hour, all while our waitress’ eyes cut daggers into the backs of the red pleather booths. Allow me to be unafraid & inconvenient a little longer. And when, at the end of the night, our waitress charges us $7.00 a glass— Call it even. Call it inflation. Because next to me, my girl bubbling, brimming, poured, and I would pay anything just to drink the sound, let her swallow me to the core, cold pressed and water droplets bleeding at the edges, anything to taste her cosmic crisp, her red delicious, her pink lady laugh.
Audio: Xochi Quetzali Cartland reads “Love Poem Ft. Apple Juice Inflation”
Xochi Quetzali Cartland is a queer Chicana poet and seamstress from the DMV. She holds a BA from Brown University in Literary Arts, and her work has appeared in HAD, Muzzle Magazine, Oroboro/Death Rattle Literary, and elsewhere. A Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, Xochi was a finalist for the ONLY POEMS 2024 Poet of the Year Award, the runner-up for the 2025 The Missouri Review Editor’s Prize, and has received fellowships from Brooklyn Poets, National Arts Strategy, Lambda Literary, Latinx in Publishing, The Writer’s Center, and the Arts Club of Washington. Starting in the fall of 2026, Xochi will be an MFA student at Johns Hopkins University. Find more of her work on ig xochi_cartland
Love it! I'll never look at Mrs. Potts the same way again...
“The way delight broke into my life
and refused to leave, claimed squatters rights
and everything”
❤️