Like the waves,
you pulled away
before I could bend down
to touch you.

But
many times,
you crashed against
my limbs
while my heart
was in the sky.

I wish I could fit myself inside a bottle,
that travels across oceans
sailing off with the message,
earth is not home
anymore
and that I'm better off,
living in this beautiful irony
of getting by
with the swelling, and the panics and the wild spasms
of the waters—

the only place
where I could
never
drown.

Unravel me.
Plunge your fingers into the depths
of my anatomy-
wade into my rufescent flesh,
strum my fibers,
find me in the fissures
of my ivory bones---
then come back to the surface,
cling to the brims of my clavicles,
and tell me how
beautiful I am.

There is something about him
that I couldn’t take in
like the water swirling half-empty
in a wineglass,
my hold shaking as I made my way
to the dusty jaws
of our old paradise.
Love.
I close my eyes
and remember the moment I felt his cold fingers
slowly slipping away—
the wineglass shatters in the grass.

The water comes for
the prettier flowers.

There’s always a line
between things
that defines one apart
from the other.
I believe it also applies
between you and I,
between mother and son,
between earth and sky
which is called horizon,
or that long line between what is
and what is not.
Maybe it’s God’s way of telling us,
“This is where you’re supposed to be
and this is where I’m supposed to be.”
And those lines also have lines
in between
and in between
and in between.
Bridges,
arms,
fingers.
They all begin on one point
and end on another.
Two small points
that somehow stretch the distance
and split one apart.
That is why, when we are holding hands
we tend to look at the sky,
down the river,
or at invisible horizons—
never to meet the dots
of each other’s eyes.

I spent all those years
painting achromatic smiles
on my sad muses.