In my next life, I will tell the story of this one

and I will propose three endings;

In the first one, we meet in school

and the story unfolds like a coming-of-age,

closed-lip kisses on campus and

only a lapse of lovers' quarrels

—small fights that we laugh at, when we look back

We fumble when we sleep together, at first,

awkward limbs tossing in blankets of warm flesh,

and I listen to older women who tell me it will get better

We never leave the city, and prime the small tree growing in the garden,

for a baby. The folds of flesh on his plump arms

nuzzled by our lips in the evening. And the piano your parents give us,

never dusty in the mahogany walls of our walk-up, their keys

lulled by three sets of hands. I write a novel that never gets bound into a book

and poems only for my baby to see.

In the second one, you leave me once a year for three years

After five, we no longer speak

By seven, we are strangers

bound to the same space by occasional weddings and birthdays.

You marry, and we both leave the city

I go North and you find warmer weather in the desert

your last message goes unreturned, though I tell myself,

I will write you one day. But we are both liars

committed to the sin of fantasy.

I write because sadness looks prettier on paper. And my book

becomes a beacon for the left behind. We meet, one day,

in the aisle of a grocery store, when we visit our city. You tell me

she had your baby and we go for a drink to muse on our mistakes,

none of which we will apologize for.

Because apologies live only in the choice to do it differently.

Which we don’t make.

You want to talk about fate, and the next life. I call it foolery.

We never see each other again, but you hide in the lines of poems I write

in the breaths between notes of songs I hum

as I leave the apartments of men I do not love as much as you.

A nail in my tire, fit just tight enough, so it won’t pop. And the bike chugs along

crippled, but moving.

In the last one, I am mindful when we meet

I will leave the country after school and return only for holidays

There will be years we don’t speak,

but when we do, we chat like soft wind massages curtains of an open window

—fleeting, whimsical—the moment in the afternoon you tell your family about

when they come home for the evening.

You will know tenderness and I will know forgiveness, like an old friend

our heads not yet filled with rue.

Desire, whittled away to an aching admiration

for how we turned love into knowing. How, despite thirst,

we waited for the water to cool before we drank the tea.

I am a poet, then, and how nice it is to write

not about you, but rather, the overgrown shrub, the love of a god

cradled in prayer on the benches of the altar,

And so, our later years are spent as friends

watching the mourning doves coo as they nest on my window sill

the condensation of sunrise, not yet wet against the glass.

i

Fox says they drove into the city

Looking for the convent,

Before three nuns appeared

One after the other

Red jewel on their foreheads

Above the veil

Their whispered gestures said

Come here

A cross breed city,

Drunk off the blood of their savior

Cab drivers, who ash on their rosaries

As they ask, what do you fight for?

Cars tailgating the border

Headlights bleed to the otherside where

Kids are talking to god

Believing their dirt is holy

ii

A privilege, is to choose to leave

iii

The cabs could only drive so close to the border

Before they were shooed away by guns and words—

—people who believed their worship was an excuse to kill

Leaving the nuns to fight their own war

Protected by the cross on their chest

The trucks of other faiths

Rambling through the city

Looking for someone else’s god to blame

our heaven is still within reach

hands, outstretched, like liquid veins in the desert

the walls have fallen—

—angels shed their wings

mud houses collapsed to reveal

cathedrals of glass and marble

the lies they told us as children

burned away by a land that no longer needs water

love who you love, a hymned orison, a choir of sirens

the planets, hanging in our horizon like a nursery mobile

Saturn’s rings, spinning on its axis

and who could blame us for

finding happiness in a different god

badgering the gates of Eden to let us in

because we have worshiped, despite our sin

my dear, our heaven is just around the corner

leave your cymbals, and black clothes

they won’t hate us for being in love