Papaya Poem Half-Composed at the Poteet Swap Meet One Afternoon While a Silver Virgencita Gleams Lovingly along My Babe’s Formidable Chest
for JS


With this papaya, I
Cultivate hours that are soon an amalgamation
Of years; this span of prickly stillness, that nimble blur,
Which is already bone and tongue; and
My heart has stirred and parted,
That lucid, timid part that no one sees, no one privy,
But you—

You have the eyes for such a sight;
Precise, that vast intensity you carry
Like breath in the pocket of the lung of the eye,
Simón—esos ojitos; and for this, I promise laughter
in the portraiture of our truck,
Uninhibited laughter, colossal as air;
Promise, herein, to hold your thick
Familiarity in the cavernous expanse that is
My belly, the quinto chambers of the nopal
I’ve assembled into a corazón;

Tonight, the rabbit of the moon on my thighs, where
Your lips dance as Catrinas and Cortezes
Pirouette; a crescendo of
A painter’s suspiro;
All these seeds of papayas, all these seeds of promesas
Cascade over throat muscle and the hard
Arroyo of the vein that runs the terrain
Of all I have to give and have had taken in life and
Am offering to you, guey;
Remember when you said,

Damn, chulo, with those lips and those eyes,
I could spend some serious time…