Because it was the summer
your acrylics were orange-matte.
You ran them up my naked chest,
made a string & cup telephone
between my navel & neck. I wanted you
to slide a prayer into my belly, press
your ear to my mouth. Listen
to the ends of your voice survive
the meat of me & know no part of you
disappears in the transbodylation of us. No gold
hung from my ears or neck that night.
We had been dancing early 2000’s bachata
& I knew wherever your hips gestured,
I’d find the morning. Because it was the summer,
we left the suicide door open. Romeo Santos’ voice
lingering fingers around your nape
& your breath on my cheek like the memory
of birth. Pizza crusts sweated on cardboard
in a corner & maybe we’d come
all this way just to be here. Here—
something about how your sun sign is my moon &
Harlem is not close to Honduras & our tongue
fibers were celloed to different vowel drops & whatever.  
Everything is impossible if we forget the space
between our shoulder blades is also a valley.
So, tell them the morning found us impossible—as ever.
With earlobes pregnant like rain clouds,
the pull of home always weighing & always waiting.
That we tried to fold each other into a creaseless
Virginia town but the shriek of birds snipped
that string you drew through me. Don’t say
that because your acrylics were orange-matte,
I knew it was summer. That the sun rose
from the crescent of your cuticles & I let your hands
tell me the seasons. Don’t say that when I opened
my mouth and let my insides spill over the suicide door
the next morning, before anything else, out came your prayers.

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