A Villanelle: to be cared for (underwater)

Oh, I can’t get over your dimpled smile.
Rise, rise, surface as a newborn baptized.
So happy to see you, it's been a while.

Her words floated overnight for miles.
Between breaths blooms a tide crystalized.
Oh, I can’t get over your dimpled smile

To be cared for changes my lifestyle.
Our joints light up as we swim mesmerized.
So happy to see you, it's been a while.

Though the void of living may be hostile;
Moonbeam, you are loved. Hope you realize.
Oh, I can’t get over your dimpled smile.

Silver hair, medal for true juveniles.
With a gentle look, green eyes authorized,
So happy to see you, it's been a while.

If and when the days get clouded in vile,
Dare. Feel everything. Unanesthetized.
Oh, I can’t get over your dimpled smile;
So happy to see you, it's been a while.

Single lines looking forward

(After Francine J. Harris)

She called me Dear.
New York.
Does not seem as dreamy with people I don’t want there, does it?
What else
Do you need besides being seen by the people you love?
A TV playing a video in an art gallery is somehow purely sensual, but not sexual.
Like you, I am a refugee in my friend's presence.
My mom says: Say thank you for being on God's list of people who woke up today.
I don't know how to talk to old people, or young people, or my people.
When I’m high, I feel the gums in my mouth brighten and swollen.
I'm out of flowers, and no one wants to see an empty pot in a cemetery.
We don’t talk anymore, we are not friends, nor acquaintances, nor potential romantics.
I see vomit of snow on the sidewalk on sunny January mornings.
San Francisco is a sanctuary for the lost.
An invisible baby stroller looks over Alcatraz.
Like me, you consider giving up warmth for the price of connection.
I eat the soft autumn lie of comfort.
There is a bed somewhere in Lima, with a room, just for me.
There is a room somewhere in Lima, with a bed, just for me.
And I tell to the day desire surpasses fear
Hold me, if not forever, for a reason.

A letter

Sweet Rosemary, would miracles await if we believe?
Hold this secret: friends find coffee sour.
Only words could be playfully bitter.

Sweet Rosemary. To scream:
Am I a child of devotion? Are you?
But my dreams have been covered in gasoline.

Sweet Rosemary, not the herb, merely the name.
It is a blessing to not understand
To read citric diction found in your letters.

Sweet Rosemary, when Ocean leaves you. Sweet.
You outshine salt and sea. Don’t choke when I say
I never understood the smell of flowers.

Silent morning rage

With silent morning rage,
I look at everything differently.
Pain rushes like watercolours on paper.
Sinking into every step of my stroll,
Thin threads of air connect my muscles
irrationally heavy to carry.
My school backpack is the nighttime monster
of the clicking 22-year-old hip.
I know how to pop CBD gummies all too well;
Just like I know there's someone in the room
when I talk to you. Crawling, unwanted
yet irresistible to vanish from my insides.
I look at everything differently
when my body doesn't feel like a body
but a heavy corpse.

Dim lights

Once, last November, I said I would
Take every inch, liquid, material, earth
Toss my phone aside and play
Break intergenerational chains of poisoned
indecency that our bodies only have.

Only women feel
guilt, we crawl away to the unheaven.
Mother Earth, you should not fear
It’s not your fault you’re polluted
filthy, uneven, damned.
Alone
In unfamiliar cities, taking
unholy ghost walks.

Once I was a sigh of sore throat
My existence, a menace.
In a dimple church of absences
I take my clothes off.
For you, it’s fun
For me, it’s penitence
But men don’t know
how to listen.

Violet

(A persona poem)

At 2 am, they call me.
At 3 am, ceremoniously dumped
in the backseat of a taxi.

At 5 am, a cry for attention in the waiting
room, eager to bend the eggshell walls.
At 6 am, a sanitized rejection crawl.
At 7 am, a nurse whispers You can go home,
as if home appears the closer it is to silence.

I moved up the list
But not the list I wanted.

At 3 pm, I doubt my heart is more
than a chocolate organ.
A sticky, melting paste, leaving less
with each and every touch.

At 6 pm I resent trying
the far and near,
the intimidating and mellow,
and especially,
the betraying.

At 7 pm, I am found on the kitchen floor,
By rays of sunlight blinking through half-closed blinds.
As if Morse code is my native language, I’ll wake up disoriented.
What time is it? What world is this? What did the sun mean
after all?

At 8 pm, I’ll beg.
How rare to be used to long days. Don’t leave yet, I’ll blink back.

Night arrives without a warning.
I want to become a person through the comfort of hands
around my waist. Sunshine
that warms
the parts of the body that forgot
how to feel. Rays only
from what is purely sincere.
Tell me, kindly, am I real yet?