Waynay
I use your words of encouragement as an excuse to lie parallel to the window
I’ve always loved men like you
Even before I understood identities or how countries are paved on our hips
My cousin from Barranco tells me I like men like me-Americanos con padres de Latinoamerica
I remind her we were born in the same hospital, but I left long before I could ever know much of anything
As I look out the window and connect the buildings one by one
I re-visit the coastlines we claimed to know intimately, lining continents we hold in our eyelids
I’ve loved you long before borders, before Walmart’s defined cities
Long before white men even knew of our continents
Long before there was survival.
We blink to visit the same flashes of light
The skin we share we exchange back and forth in between meals
In the altar I saw in my dreams, I drew your name from rocks smothered by cascades
Refined by the only God that has ever spoken back.
Sisterhood
Give me your most significant grief and joy
Like the stilts carrying the Montserrat, my conviction is leaning forward.
The stories we share, the dreams we taped on the window
Gliding our hope somewhere beneath the concrete, the silt
Every version we’ve ever been is grounded
Even the versions we are still explaining
If I’ve ever given anything right-
I bend my hands into a cove
The same formation that stretched our spines at birth
Baring both the rise and the coil,
Our mothers were right.
Your sister was meant to be your longest love.
The story within stories
If, somehow, we get lost in the seams of history, and we become distant ancestors, and our story is never told again
If this is all that we ever are.
A split hem making space
The simple and fascinating
Complaining about expensive groceries
Sharing our thoughts throughout the day
Confiding our ideas with one another
Catching up on shows in the evening
If all we ever do is go towards each other
Each moment clipped together to suspend alike, at once
Resembling something like a cautioned feeling settling amongst our great-granddaughter and their sons
And like a lost memory returning with a familiar scent
They’ll recognize love like an involuntary stretch. A memory they will never have to recover from.
How often you remember
"What could have been" is the only truth sustained by solitude.
And some stories end untouched, un-briefed of reality. Never knowing how beautiful it is to be recognized.
Making Sense
Love is a weird thing. How you can love someone and love them again years later, loving them at a different age, mindset, and appearance?
Lessons come, and ideas fade. The only thing we've rushed is our morning routines.
But we're together, refusing to be anything other than here, alive.
We'll repeat the same stories for years, live the same days, and create traditions and routines.
What happens in the end?
What if death is what is in between us while we're calling out to each other
Like an echo slowly finding its way out of a tunnel.
The mist falls like a lie aiding a forgotten memory.
I've seen this place in a dream long before I met you.
Stars are wasting their light here; we see enough.
We are enough. See how time moves?
Never intending to let go.
We walk, oblivious of life and death.
Our hands clasped, still, still believing.
Home
In Caraz they say
The peak of the day when the ocean and sky meet
The moment they become endless
That union is love
When I’m with you I’m convinced love can heal ancestral wounds
I break in a dialect that is earned not given
Become each word that wasn’t allowed to be spoken
Become the legacy of a stolen past
The density of bones buried under gold churches
The wind that guides our daughters left
The saints that were given to us for each part of our journey
The rain that washed away footprints as they carried the casket around town
The bark of the tree that mends and mends
When I’m with you, I’m convinced
Love has always been my inheritance