When a light cast on the autumn gleam that thrust golden warmth throughout the city, I let everything go. There was no need for my minds hateful repetition of these years’ mistakes. In the great war of love, I stripped myself, scorched with blood of limbs and sounds that strained when winter lost its voice to the mountains.
I lost my voice too.
If the soil were soft my feet would just break through it. Wondering about a life that could be bare and shipped away, my heart like silk. She watched with elongated eyes studying the gleam of petals that transformed into words, snakelike and watering roots that would never grow into anything more than second-rate.
She Never Told me her Name
When the city was still stuck
in the mornings blueness
illuminating from my window,
silence washed over me like waves.
I peeked into Barcelona’s veins
feeling the pumping of the rhythm
that transcends from it’s youthful streets.
where the sun had not yet opened its tired eyes
She was already up,
walking with her eyes fixated in the blueness.
She opened the coffee shop
that she did not own
swept the floors
that did not belonged to her
and poured the coffee
that she never drank.
In the mornings I’d stop and see her,
“Cafe con leche por favor”
she smelled of Red Carnations
her cinnamon hair
tucked and tightened
into a bun.
Her words
a puzzle where nothing ever
fit
every time I went to see her
we laughed and smiled
as her sharp eyes told stories.
She called me Guapa,
and never told me her name.
I asked where she was born
with my broken tongue,
“Morocco”
a place to me of sand
that piles upon my head
but for her,
a place she forever called home.
I imagined her life of climbing an endless latter
of work and time slipping past her wide eyes.
I wanted to splatter paint on our paths
erasing the moments where the blueness
took hold of us,
her and I.
In the days when words had no meanings
in the months where I called Barcelona
my home.
I left Barcelona with a knot in my stomach
leaving a place where people were alive and restless
where the sun reached every child’s face
in the hours when the city screamed for morning.
And I remember my teacher saying,
“There’s always a light at the end of every tunnel.”
I felt the Barcelona sun one last time in the morning swelter
I said goodbye to a love that I could not touch or kiss
but laid my palms on the warm slanted streets
and flew home like a bird with new wings.
But I came home to hear that you crashed your car
To hear your cries hollow and bitter
I came home to a cold house
where the sun was covered by blank snow
my wings seemed to crack as I flew lower
into the grave which you dug for me
I see now the small light fading
from the never ending tunnel
where birds don’t fly but turn to bones.
And your there,
waiting to catch the next train out of this life
where you can use freely
where you can be at peace with yourself,
leaving us to clean up the tears,
abandoning me of having a sister.
The streams speak softly in the spring.
I hear it,
the years changing me,
like a drain
I get sucked down
drowning in the springs cruel hands.
Watch me drown sister
watch me drown.