1 teaspoon of fear
1 pint of hope
A dash of bitterness
2 cups of shame
12 ounces of insecurity
3 unspoken words

A simple recipe
Creating this awkward situation
Between the two of us

him and i had the relationship of a
five year old and a balloon
i was so happy to have him
and promised i would never
let him go
until one day
my mind slipped
and suddenly
just like that
he was gone
and i was just stuck
watching,
crying,
but not able to do anything
because
my arms got tired

You should know
You're just a temporary fix
She's a ****
An obscured partial eclipse
She runs and hides
Behind a mask of addictive scripts
She's the game
You just feel good against her melanin

You should know
She's incoherently captivating
She's a naked lady
Amaryllis Belladonna
Poisonous and pink
She'll hit a switch you can't describe
Concurrently splitting your spine
Yet enhancing the fruits of your mind

She's a ****
And you're just a temporary fix
Where she lives
Love does not exist

You are so much more than a pair of green eyes.
Your heart is golden but sometimes your thoughts dull its shine.
It might take some rain and maybe even a thunderstorm, but I promise you,
It will be worth far more than the pain
to see you
see for the first time.
And you are nearing that day.

I miss the boy who sells fruit in a place where people say no good comes out of. I miss his shorts that look like fields ripe with harvest and his ocean of a t-shirt.

I miss his little mop of wavy black hair, his green eyes that become crystals in the sunlight and deepen in its absence.

Is your name Garik? Or is it Garo? Or am I getting you mixed up with someone else? I may have forgotten the symbols for which represent you but I will never forget what made you you to me, here:

Your smile as wide as the watermelons you sell. Your heart warmer than the strong coffee your mother makes. Your scrawny legs that always made their way a little closer to me no matter what time of the day it was and your voice that crossed oceans with a melody that sang "We are here."

And we were.

We were two people-- you of pomegranates and fresh sunflower seeds and I of mangoes and mangosteens, two entirely different shades of earth, you with your snow flakes and I with my sun rays, you with your black robed monks and I with my white clothed priests, yet there we were.

Oh brave little boy, I love how different doesn’t scare you.

My slanted eyes did not seem strange you, nor did you question why my skin looks like the browned sides of baked bread compared to the floury white of your arms. You did not find it funny that I must be at least five years older than you are yet must be at least half a head shorter. It did not matter to you that the only words we had to give each other in the same tongue were “Hello!”, “How are you?”, “What is your name?”, “Where are you from?” because sometimes those words are all it takes to make your way into someone’s heart and stay.

As for mine, stay you did. Language, cultural, socio-economic barriers were nothing to you.

Instead, you simply played the boy who wanted to know the girl. And so I played the girl who responded, the girl who saw the boy's clouds of smoke in the sky spelling out "We are here.”

And we were.

And it’s been three months.

Now you are there.

And I am here.

But to you, it's the other way around. Because here is a matter of who is telling the story. Maybe we will never again be characters in the same chapter. Or maybe we will be. And maybe I am counting the pages until for us, here is right where we both are.

There is poetry in blood- in the veins
that licked up my spine and down
a silhouetted profile in last night's lusting whisper
and this mourning's coffee.

There is something in the way
she holds the knife-cutting
onions for tacos and
laughing for the guests, pulling

down her sleeves, adjusting
her hair in the
reflection of the sink. She looks
just fine
this way, using
these silver deposits to search
for something- perhaps
lost down the disposal
or obscured by drops
of blood from where she nicked
herself.

And she watches the blood seep and
her lines blur with
these words and
the page- or is it
her face?

It blushes.