staring at the smallness of your lower back
moving up the hills
Your shoulders swayed right and left
as the path turns rocky; I kept thinking
how you lead the way and never looked back once or questioning if
there was anyone trying to keep up
You'll live, either way, you said
you got used to the continuous beeping signals
of emergency parking when your dad
used to drive you around and left
you wait for hours. I
turn the signal once to change
lanes and you whispered
"oh, that sound." Like you are thrown
back in time, twelve years old once again,
soon without mother. Soon without father
whose women are getting younger and
crazier and at one point
it's safer to just go without looking back.
2. I dip my fingers into the tender stream
of mid-summer
Cool, murky water
that raises the greens like
mothers' tears bathed our young skin
Your mother has become a ghost
that lives in you; you love the soft, round
breasts that remind you of once
unconditional affection. Love was since
difficult to find or sustain. My mother
wants to be loved by a woman ruined
by war; she loved me the only way
she knows how: keeping me from
what she deemed as threats like
bomb holes, car accidents, bad teachers
and premarital sex. She once asked
me if I'm gay and I wasn't totally lying
when I said no. I'm not gay, like you
are not lost, and we are not
a mistake.
I swallow the echoes of the sound
swinging on the edge of a mountain
dropping out of your slightly open
lips. I look, and look, and ||| look |||
until you vanish into the jade foggy screen.
3. I put the stolen sight of you in my chest pocket
developing them into photographs
in the darkroom inside my closet
And i keep you there
with a hundred poems and one
heart broken
all the bright things are dead
but you are alive.
4. I travel across borders the world map
unfolding on your skin
I carry you in my shadow to strange cities
where skies are lonely
and afternoons smell like
strangers' sweat
I become the eyes you see
i become the can you see
me weeping of nothingness on endless
staircases looking for an answer
in my lucid dream
Didn't dare waking up hoping I could
mold the thing
you give
(you never give
me what I want
even in my wildest dream)
xx. I effaced you
like a misspelled word on
paper: a word that I have since repeatedly
write until unrecognizable; my pen bleeds
your name I taste iron in my mouth
when I try to say it out loud
Say you didn't love me. It's more
difficult than convincing both of
us that I wasn't brave enough to
love you. But if I were to do it all
over again I wouldn't do the same.
I rather not having you than losing
a part of me, threading thin, draping
into every steps I took away from
you, wholeheartedly cutting off my own
skin so the part where you touched
wouldn't sting me like deteriorated dreams.
When my mother asked where you
were and how come you weren't around
anymore, I hope I had understood
that pain that swallowed me whole
yet my tongue has a mind if its own
it produced lies in half a blink and it said
you were just too busy and I was busy too
but we would hang out soon.
Soon is after the forever it would take
for us to heal from our accidental
affair. The thing you gave me in
my wildest dream, an open
invitation back to your life,
a life where
I am not gay, you are not lost,
and we weren't a mistake.
