I
cajones
Imiscalculated the amount of time
you can metaphorically keep people
in boxes.
For twenty-eight days, you were a compilation of
letters and key chains,
holes on doors,
love declarations on yellow movie ticket stubs.
It was so easy to recognize
that particular shade of sadness in you eyes.
“Dame un abrazo,”
and I did.
I didn’t miscalculate
the location of the familiar gaps
where we fit right back
into each other.
The second embrace was a collection
of earthquakes between the tectonic plates
of our shoulders,
and you felt like fragile glass
that I was not holding with enough care.
I’ve already broken you enough
why do you slip back
so easily into my sharp corners?
Distance makes the heart grow
stiffer, like the crackling petals
of every flower you placed
between my fingers.
"They remind me of you.”
Now you try to find your way back,
following the scattered limbs
of every keepsake I tried to bury
in the bedrock.
You’ll keep trying to reach me, but
my heart is a valley,
made up of the broken fragments
that tell the coordinates to our miscalculated love.
Maybe next time, you can keep me in the box
and you won’t shed a tear
over what you think you lost
when I severed myself from you.
II
caja de metal
Ever since I put you out
like that last cigarette,
solitary in a crumpled
cajetilla,
I've remembered what it's like
to breathe without you,
lurking in the
cavity
of my chest.
“I’ll probably marry you,” I whisper,
craving that metallic taste
on my tongue,
having your remnants
on the beds of my fingers.
Let me open the next
cajetilla,
and inhale you while
you’re still around
leaving a trail
of embers in my ashtray.
I just wrote a story in
my head
about how I jump on airplanes,
leaving you because
bringing you with me would be
a federal crime.
I’ll laugh
from within the cellblock because
they can’t jail away
the story of us
scarred on my corroded lungs.
I just wrote a story in
my head
about how even when I’ll need
a metal chest to breathe
for my decaying lungs
I will still come back to you.
I feel like I’ve written this story before.
Had these words uttered
through made-up lips
and baby pink lungs.
They say the first step
to overcoming addiction
is to admit you have a
problem.
I’ll probably marry you.
III
mis cajas de implicaciones
You once told me
“yo nos veía como una sola persona”
which made me think
about how alone I felt sometimes
so I guess that makes sense.
[Sometimes being with yourself isn’t
enough.]
If we are mirror images of each other,
your skin is my skin,
my brain is yours,
our wrists share the same veins,
then was I trying to cut diagonally
when I severed myself from you.
[“Down the road, not across the street”.]
I detoxed by putting you in a box,
but it wasn’t long before
I dug you up,
read the letters,
listened to the songs,
exhaled the toxicity that we’d spread
to each other.
[Rinse and repeat.]
I didn’t see us
as one person,
but I did tie you to me
with a collection of strings.
When I noticed
you kept getting tangled with my
implications, your body bruised,
beaten,
I realized it would be too late to
cut them without making you bleed
[Red string of fate bullshit.]
We are not the same person,
but I know you,
all of you, from
the lines on your forehead
that denote a life too old
for your young body,
your sad eyes
(“I can’t believe you thought they were brown.”),
the thin, feminine fingers I’ll never have.
A moustache?
[You can never really know all of somebody.]
I spend our time together
trying to heal the crisscross scars
that I meticulously calculated
trying to unearth the magic of
your skin,
like outlining constellations
in the sky.
I know now
there is magic in you
and I don’t need to lay claim
over it, for it to be
there
[]
Lista de imágenes:
1-4. Sydney Sie, Unexpectable Boxes, 2015.
