Life Force in Seville
You feed me olives in the old city. Yes, love is a sort of blindness,
but here on this walk, I notice everything—bougainvillea,
river the color of wine, a cathedral outgrowing minarets—
not because we’re awake but because we share this field.
Look at the boys disappear into moonlight. Kiss my eyelids. Hold my chin.
Tomorrow, Granada. Tomorrow, beers and espresso and sangria.
It won’t matter. Read me a paragraph, I never finished Crime and Punishment.
“The whole question here is am I a monster, or a victim myself?”
I’m tired of walking. You teach me we don’t have to answer:
we’ve crossed the river three times already.
Something about instinct is so authoritarian.
I mean, why you? (Because there is a boat, and another river).
You laugh. Our language: an interrupted dream.
I mean there is no God but God, and we come from the same ruins.
Tell me where albaricoque comes from, and naranja.
A history of apricot trees under your window,
your family’s Sunday ritual of fresh orange juice.
Imagine we lived three decades without hearing each other,
and now, on our last night, we see a Flamenco show. Two women,
hands like arrows, digging through ground with a song.
Such sorrow. Why are you crying?
Because the dancers are so beautiful and we’ll never find them again.
Because how else to describe this? We were found. We hadn’t been looking.
Photograph
Friends on grass, toes itching.
It is warm and Sunday.
They’ve known each other for years,
so what is unsaid is still captured.
Their mouths half-open, one of them asks,
Why are we still here?
To laugh, another says.
That is the general agreement
on that afternoon
where the sea is beastly blue.
You can’t see in the picture but flies buzz.
Ants crawl and a white butterfly flaps
above shoulders, a great omen.
Clouds like birds. Birds like wind.
This city forces a love of disappearing things:
all these fences and wires,
rubber trees replaced with parking lots.
Even the birds will soon flock elsewhere.
But before they share fruits and fish,
and a frame. This sweet breath.
It is September and they want to stay alive.
Foresight
For months we wake up beside
each other. Both of us a little sad
unable to name what it is we forget.
You chop the parsley slowly,
marinate the meat in seven spices.
I learn without watching. I know
your shoulders hurt, your wrists
and lower back, and I want to be
a better daughter, pound the garlic
and carry your plastic bags
but you forgive me even before
I need you to. At night
I take you to see a play.
We sit at the back, giggling
like girls ecstatic to be friends.
On the way home it is dark and damp,
the lump in my throat sudden like fever.
To be born is to part you,
for the first time.
How else to say?
Mama I want to hold you,
to be held by you—forever.
