Cricket in the Slit of a Tummy, by Shandela Contreras

Poetry, chapbook, 28 pages, from Bottlecap Features. Cricket in the Slit of a Tummy is a lyrical excavation of the Black & Brown body as both target and vessel. The hospital recurs here: sterile, haunted, and historically unkind, where marginalized women are expected to be silent. Threaded through these poems is an unflinching study of the cycle women inherit; how they are molded, whether consciously or by quiet modeling, to become saviors: to guard the future, to preserve the family through the preservation of themselves. Yet the very systems that demand this duty often deny the freedom or resources to fulfill it. Here, that tension breathes and breaks open. Speaking through the voice of mother, grandmother, and the unnamed women whose stories stitch our shared history, the poet blurs the borders between personal and communal, embodying the truth that when one woman suffers, her echoes should reverberate through us all. The poet names herself a cricket: nocturnal, underestimated,