after Noor Hindi

How many children believe the moon
follows them, down the highway,
like a nocturnal guardian angel?

Face stamped against the glass,
you, too, point to rubble.
It’s Friday night, and Providence

wells up in the horizon
like grief. A skyline
of abandoned buildings:

ruin and possibility. Unlike the moon,
we’re more than collateral damage.
Sure, we collided in Spanish

class, two Latinas with American
shame, but it is not gravity
that holds us together.

Rather than a science,
our orbit is art: full of choices
and mistakes. Like the time I ghosted

you all summer, or, our first kiss.
We are back to where we started:
our cemetery city, which unfurls

from the river like scroll paper.
We danced salsa at the gay
club on Richmond, sipped

lattes at the cafe-bookstore-bar.
We fought in an 1800s mall,
made up, a year later, over ramen.

Returning is like reading aloud lines
of a draft, for hints of where it might go next.
As if our past could tell the future.

But I don’t think it’s that simple:
I choose desire over destiny.
You, over the moon.