I went outside to watch
the stars tonight, curled
in my Adirondack chair
but those stars, I swear,
peered right back at me
blinking their diamond eyes
in the quivering silence, inquiring
in some universal Morse code,
So, what are you
going to do next?
Lupita Eyde-Tucker is a bilingual poet and translator raised in New Jersey and Guayaquil, Ecuador. She is an MFA candidate at the University of Florida, and the winner of the 2021 Unbound Book Festival Emerging Poet Award. Lupita also won the 2019 Betty Gabehart Prize, and in 2018 was selected as an AWP Writer to Writer Mentee by poet Maggie Smith. In 2020 her poems were finalists in the Sewanee Review Poetry Contest, Loraine Williams Poetry Prize, River Heron Review Poetry Prize, and her chapbook manuscript was a finalist in the Black River Chapbook Competition, Frontier Poetry's Chapbook Contest, and Gloria Anzaldúa Prize. 