Delta

Sediment days. We are in the great delta plumb lining the sink. You hold my hands. We’re no different. No different. Melancholy is an architect. Clay shapes along the avenue lay prone and amnesia, mute blood pressure of underwater streets. There are whole cities down there. Another where we kiss goodbye on corners. One where my mouth never leaves yours. An avenue shaped like the crook of your neck where trucks lose their way. Instead of clouds, the feet of strangers. Longing doesn't float for long. Women sop wet with time. Me and my hands are busy. Moving the mud. Looking for corners where we meet again. Again, said with hunger. Accumulating.

Taste

See her in the market. She has oranges in a basket. She doesn’t like oranges. Finds them sloppy. Overt. The sky goes glass again. He likes swimming, but she doesn’t know why. The looseness of feet at sea. Betrayals of hair. Can’t he see she’s on fire again. She knew it was your mouth she could taste on him.

In her Aunt’s garden, smells to distract her., her legs move slowly, crisscross the garden path. The fallen sunflowers, stalks broken under weight, drunk and huddled in the underbrush, know her, green as five o’clock shadow and despair. A shallow sleep tonight. A head thrown back to see the blank page ceiling. Sheets as binding. Pillows as other people as place settings. She can still taste your mouth.

Pinata

In the resort town, it’s late and I leave the nightclub early. In the hotel of stairs and pools, I change the channels on the television. I find our favourite Chinese film, only it has Spanish subtitles. I am at a loss. I can almost imagine what they’re saying because I’ve seen it before. Desire works that way. I am mistaking everything.

Three buildings over, strangers dance on the rooftop, the music arriving to me later so they all appear drunk, staggering in lurch to the music together. Downstairs, behind a door open to the street, an old woman makes piñatas. She is alone with the torrid heavens of pinks, yellows, and reds floating above. One night can stand in for everything.

Still Life

A still life. You in the bed, my bed, leaning against the wall in repose and boxer shorts. Seen from the kitchen, frame of the doorway as I make espresso. You are waiting, exhausted. Maybe you’ll fall asleep there. But for now you watch me, framed by the kitchen doorway. We are in different rooms; the air is still. I closed the windows so the birds wouldn’t wake you.

We are liars of time. We can pretend minutes are days. And we can forget and a whole morning can become minutes. Such lies.

Things that have never known words flop on the table in front of me. This is the diminishing. How an orange peeled with your hands can become something else. And then just an orange again. How the air in these rooms will rush out and leave the smell of paint and carpets like you were never here. Things become more real at a cost.

Outside the Cafe

This morning on the Malecon, I see that there are no more love letters. No one comes here for longing, to miss someone. No one.

We walk the old city avoiding hills, the righteousness of gravity, trickles among the cobblestones. A man walks shouldering a crate of tomatoes. He might know something about it.

You were here two months before me, had an affair with a man with down-turned eyes and thick lips. The city is dirty with your clumsy hands, your kisses stain walls along the market street like warnings.

Outside the café, a man with a ladder gets lost in the cat’s cradle of wires string between store fronts above him. He stands caught and closes his eyes.

Morning light plays dust across the trees, dirty as dirt. This all happens in the time of the slipping, the letting go. There are no more love letters. Just the city of steps and stumble and stray dogs. No one comes here for longing.

Malecon

All along the malecon, near the playa de los muertos I think of blood. There are terrors in a strange city. Something the idle grey dog on the sidewalk can’t smell anymore. On the Malecon, small children climb the statue of small children climbing. I don’t know how this ends.

These are the small carnages. The things that happen in the slipping. You are sleeping on friends’ couches. He is walking the hallways of your home thinking about laundry. I am a continent away placing down words carefully trying not to see how I am not part of this.

I am nothing in this city. The rooms here like gaps, the rooms where you kissed him until the colour drained out into the courtyard, hid in the garden. You have destroyed balconies, stars and ponds with your kisses. The city is demolished. Your mouth is everywhere. All along the highway small fires of truth are burning. Women stay home and cover their mouths.