She has received poetry fellowships from the National Endowment for the arts, the Florida Arts Council and the Cintas Foundation, and was awarded the 1996 Jessica Noble Maxwell Memorial Poetry Prize from American Poetry Review . A native of Cuba, Silvia has lived in Tampa all of her adult life. She is managing editor for Organica Quarterly. Silvia has given permission for us to publish to the Web her poem Tourism in the Late 20th Century below. Tourism in the Late 20th Century Blue boat of morning and already the window is besieged by sky.
Grace takes no prisoners in a town like.
Think of the girl sipping white burgundy in the local cafe', her straw hat with its pale flower, indigenous and small as the white roll she's buttering one philosophical corner at a time. Even the rain that falls some afternoons here is more conceptual, more a tribute to rain than actual rain falling on the tulips, a rumor the wind carries all the way down the beach. Wrote Kerouac once in a book about a woman who was already a metaphor, rose fading in its glass bowl. He always knew the world is sentimental, waving its lacy rags over the face of the familiar, an architecture of piano notes and hope. She knows each road leads to other roads, to small towns with solid names like Crestview and Niceville where even dust has a genealogy and an address, as if there's more forever there.