Me acuerdo de tener seis años, de estar sentada en la mesa de la cocina, / de levantar la vista de donde estaba hundiendo las uñas en una fruta para desvestirla, / y de encontrar suspendida en el aire a una bolita blanca, como algodón pero más flaca.
Dejé los párpados al lado de la cáscara para pelar los ojos / y mirar a lo que no podía ser otra cosa que el esqueleto de un pompón entrar por la ventana.
¿Era un insecto?
Arácnido, capaz.
¿Viviría por días / o por horas?
Voló hasta que llegó a la mesa de la cocina, / se paró al lado de mi cáscara de mandarina / y yo no me pregunté por insectos ni arácnidos / ni por días ni por horas, / sino por como algo sin alas / podía igual volar.

Capturé a una, una vez. / No con un aplauso, como haría con un mosquito, / pero con manos juntas y ahuecadas, / dedos como rejas que supieron enjaularla, / y la adopté como mascota.
La paré sobre uno de mis nudillos con pies que ella no tenía / y la acerqué a un pedazo de durazno, / esperando a que volara desde mi mano hasta la fruta que estaba mudándose a marrones en colores / y a podrido en gusto, / para que coma con una boca que yo no veía.
Intenté / una y otra vez. / La mimé, / la acaricié con cuidado de no quebrarla, / le susurré que fuerza, que vamos, come algo. / Y ella no se dio ni vuelta a mirarme, / y yo viví con un gusto amargo en la boca / que tenía cualquier cosa en la que apoyara los dientes. / Hasta que una noche la bolita se da a la fuga, y yo me ahogo en duelo / hasta que llega algo nuevo a casa, / algo con cuatro patas, / con dientes que yo si veo y una lengua que da besos / cuando le doy la fruta más rancia que puedo encontrar al fondo del cajón de la heladera, / y la bolita me olvidó, / y yo la olvido.

Pasa un tiempo de algún tamaño hasta que aprendo que esa bolita con espinas incontables como pelos en ***** no era insecto / ni araña / ni vivió / ni murió.
Diente de león, le dice mi mamá, / lo pronuncia igual que cómo cuando yo le señalo algo de plástico o de metal, / redondo o plano, / en cuatro ruedas por la calle o echando raíces en el pasto, / y le pregunto qué es eso.
Diente, yo repito, / no cómo un que / sino como un nombre, / y pienso en mi Diente. Mascota, prisionera, compañera, / su cucha un frasco vacío de mermelada y sus días un montón de nada, / de tratar de escaparse cada vez que soplaba el viento y de hacerme echar a perder como fruta vieja de tanta angustia cada vez que llegaba la hora del almuerzo y Diente no comía / ni lloraba / ni gritaba / ni me miraba.
Diente ni siquiera era flor, / aprendí mucho después, / sino una congregación de semillas / que nace de una flor amarilla / y prende vuelo por el aire hasta que vuelve a tocar tierra, / para que broten nuevos dientes, / nuevas flores, / nuevas semillas, / y se repita.
Y entonces no la culpo / a mi Diente. Era solamente / un ramo de flores por nacer. / Yo igual me enamoré.

It's always a house.
In shelved books, in five-drinks-in five a.m talks, in cheap rhymes and lavish ones—commonplace for anywhere you can find words on, a standard metaphor to stumble upon. Infrastructure lets itself be borrowed for anatomy and soul: a soot-tainted chimney standing for smoker’s lungs, the fire burning warm at its feet for scorching anger, the crayon scribbles on nursery wallpapers like the prints of anyone an angry smoker has ever loved, shutters as eyelids and walls for bones and tablecloths for clothes and pillars as brawn.
An easy metaphor, a house as a body. A lazy one. Sluggish, yawning Metaphor, craving a nap, a break from being used up. Boring enough to make me look up from my page and at everyone else sitting around the table, writing about vessels vined in breezeblocks and headache diagnoses from front door knocking. Dreary enough to make me want to leave the room.
So I do. The door closes shut like a wind’s mistake, clicks, and it stands between me and the other side of the bone-white wall, an oaken bodyguard of drowsy writers working on.
Go on. Look around the room.
Chair. Tables. Walls. Oh, a roof leak.
No. Really look, I mean.
Lining paper yellowing in the places where hands and chair tops brushed past for years. Shiny furniture with dust collecting in the crannies out of sight. A bowl of food (dog one, full to the brim—human one, empty with a filthy rim). Rusty hinges and inherited silverware.
Marked up, unkempt on weekdays, prettied up for visitors, its value found in numbers, its keys given out for access, put up for rent or sold to the best offer, filthy, hungry, painted, remodeled, lived in, abandoned—and they won’t let me back in now, but I’m scratching on the body-guard's wooden trunk to write down about body-like house limbs.

Borrow the bones, written on the back of a receipt, nothing else to go off of. An instruction, maybe? To dig a hole in the ground of my backyard and look for what remains of my childhood pet, frail thing now turned to hard nothing. A quote, Neruda's, life is only a borrowing of bones. A metaphor about something always remaining, because even after chewing you up they'll still have to spit out your marrow, or a slight more literal way of asking myself to learn to enjoy having other people's leftovers, because once it's too late I'll be looking at licked clean plates to find the speck of sauce I'm hungry enough to swallow down, porcelain and all.

On the first notebook I ever got myself, for the purpose of gut spilling with hearts for i's dots, a teenager's private diary: How do I forgive her? Saying she’s human means little to nothing. I am too, and I've never forgiven myself. A friend, for living her life in a way I was too green and young to see as anything other than betrayal? My mom, for being. A friend's mother, for not letting her hang out at my place. The love of my life—whoever she was at that year, day, hour of the night.

A draft of a text I never sent, dramatic and with a blinking cursor coming in even more theatrical flashes: I think having you would kiII me. But I've never had anyone and I've never died.

It's a Neruda quote, it was the best friend who never hit me back, and I've never really thought to begin with. It's whatever I want it to be, or else I would have given it an end, put a heart-dotted name to it, sent it, I would have borrowed those bones, forgiven her, had her.

Like any kid who is lucky enough to have the world want him in it, he has been taught how to love—a seminar where his dad shows him how to strip aloe vera in two to lay it over spots the sun has shined on for too long, a whole class dedicated to how his mom keeps on telling him stories to sleep even when he’s grown enough to read on his own.
The thing is, even though he had technically attended every lesson, he’d never thought he would need to pay attention to the instructions. So when it’s his turn for show-and-tell to go up to the front of the class and demonstrate how it’s done, he loves as if he's been forced to improvise.
Scene unscripted, role unrehearsed, character unprepared, all he can think about is how she had looked the moment right before, sunburnt by his bedside lamp on the pitch black of the room to showcase smoldered pores and the limestone of her thighs, skin that stands behind the pale line telling apart the stretch of her legs that had tanned over the summer and the one not even the sun had been allowed to kiss.
You can try to keep your plants well fed and end up overwatering them. You can lay under someone else's bedroom lamp and end up bulb-burnt. You can improv love and end up with violence. The lovers always lose at love—who else could lose the game other than the players?—because if practiced love can kiII, amateur love has every chance of leaving them as dust.
And no lesson in the world could have prepared him for that—not for the violence or the dust or the peeling skin or the failed classes—but to run a hand over a place that hasn't ever been even at sun's reach, and know he's going to be stripping aloe vera to soothe the scars he'll leave for time to come, and that he'll be telling unscripted, unrehearsed stories that stretch on and on to avoid reading out their end—(that no one, not even the sun wins).

learn to love a mother
who has given you her nose
and a place you could call home
if you just said the word.

it's a house,
with windows that are never kept clean for long
because your mother always,
without fail,
accidentally sprays them with the garden's hose.
she's a mother to the lilies and the weeds,
and you want to gloat in your rooted siblings' faces,
let them know they are playing a losing game
because you're already the favorite.
you're the one who got the nose and the house.
learn to call it a home.

love your mother because she has given you
enough pieces of advice
for you to have put together the puzzle by now.
love her because she has cradled you
when you were a tenth of yourself and
somehow more helpless than you are today.
you've already been taught how to appreciate
even what you can't remember being done for you,
but learn that this is one of those things, too.

your nose is a hook, given to you by your mother
when she told you not to rush down the hallway,
knowing you only ever feel like running
when being asked to go slower,
and the fall you take then
leaves it temporarily purple,
permanently crooked.
learn to love it before she tells you to.

You’re fifteen, and you're stuck in traffic.
You’re not driving, because you’re fifteen—that’s the bus driver’s job, to lay one hand on the gear stick and the other on a forehead baptized by summer, smoothing down car horn wrinkles and green-light degree burns.
Everything can be put down into numbers, except maybe infinity, or the amount of places where someone else is digging an elbow or a knee into you. You break the picture of it down into germs, then cells, then atoms, and let the flyspeck of it distract you from the fact it’s someone else’s bone making itself home into your skin, a tic-tac-toe played on your calves between the knees of a man going home and a woman clocking out of work, as they leave your legs in carnation X's and O's, all red wilting blotches, and one of their shoulders fits like a tetris piece between two chunks of your spine to stroke it periwinkle, a small blue sorry excuse for a bruise.
The song playing in your ears loops again. It’s the only thing you've been listening to for the last week and you don't think you can tell when it begins and when it ends anymore, and it's possible you can hear it even when your earphones are off. (They’re on, right now. You know it so because you can feel the ache of them against the jelly bone of your ears’ shell. Or maybe the ghost of a feeling has fooled you once and shamed on you.)
It's finals season and you feel like you're wasting every minute you're not staring at the flow chart on the bottom of your backpack. Something about cells, and one of them having a heart while the other one doesn’t. (This is your first year of university. You can’t be fifteen. Maybe you just feel like you are. Fooled you twice, shame on you.)
You're eighteen, and you’ve lived with yourself long enough to know you can't stop thinking, but why can't it ever be something good? Like remembering the difference between prokaryotic and eukaryotic cells without needing to look at a flow chart (which is the one with the heart?), or like figuring out what's the opposite of motion sickness—this nausea you feel from being too still in an unmoving bus (if i give it a name, does it mean it wins?).
You’re eighteen and you can’t help breaking touch into germs and atoms—like you’ll either get sick from it or survive it long enough to study it under a microscope—and you call cells’ nucleuses hearts—as if the real term for them is something to guard your naivety from, a word too crude for a girl made of carnations and periwinkles, no thorns and eggshell frail.
You’re eighteen. How about you baptize yourself, elbow your way out of the crowd and drive the bus for once?

I want to tell the truth
but it's harder than it looks
when I don't know where the line
that divides memories and fantasy lies.
I eat numbers
and rehearse every line I'll ever say,
I crave hunger
and all I know how to do is cry
because nothing ever satisfies.
Is that real or made up?
Do I hate what I am
or just hate me for hating's sake,
because I'm me and I can't ever escape?
For having to be the one
that will forever be there,
for not being able to leave myself.

A line dividing memories from fantasy,
can you show me where it lies?
Because I want to do what I think is right, but now I'm hungry all the time
and nothing ever seems to satisfy.