I Still Cough Up Pearls
I Still Cough Up Pearls
Did we live through the same love?
I can recall from my side of the mirror
how you called me dear when I was but a shadow in your doorframe,
coaxed me to be a part of something so white hot
we melted together so quickly
no one could hear me scream.
Your skin became mine and my blood became yours,
and we were a thing with one mind and six eyes
and two mouths forever occupied with the other,
a monster so wrapped up in itself
it needed no food, no water,
nothing but the blood of the second heart
panting in the other half of its concave chest,
its ribs folded over like fervent prayers’ fists
from having your freckled arms vised around my hunched shoulders.
You were mercury and when I touched you,
you fell weeping into my lap.
I thought the warmth of my hands changed you,
made you softer, sweeter,
but metal is still metal even when shaped like water.
Did we live through the same love?
Thick-knit and heavy,
like the burial shroud made for my uncle Camilo,
who shot himself after contracting a death sentence
from sharing skin with the wrong person
at the wrong time.
SIDA, they said, and shook their heads in tandem,
swollen, overripe fruit bobbing from the same family tree.
Even though I never met the fruit that fell,
I have tasted the bullet he swallowed.
It shoots through my veins,
hereditary as his blood,
the same mirror of the mercury collected in your eyes,
a reminder of the easy way to deal with betrayal
without having to worry about being sold down the river ever again.
Did we live through the same love?
A net that you caught me with,
never stopping to check if I could breathe
and not really caring either way.
Perhaps it was my fault for stopping to stare
at the way you wove your words and flashed them at me
like the ghostly strings of pearls scabbed
into the hands of the vendors at the aqueduct.
I stopped to stare and I swallowed sand,
you snared me in with those gleaming words
though you barely said a thing.
It was only until I stopped clawing for a way out that
you decided I was no beast worth getting gored over.
At least the lion kills what it captures.
No bear pulls a fish out of the river
just to watch it beat itself on the sand,
in the heat, choking choking choking on nothing at all.
Breaking Bread
They named you Beloved
after the greatest of kings,
the youth who downed Goliath
with just his stones and his sling.
They named me God’s Promise
and pledged my life to Him.
But I never felt His hand
and I never heard Him sing.
So I shaved off my name
and I dissolved the oath,
then I ran out in search
of a new kind of growth.
I left you behind
with no challenging thought.
I took the first chance to leave
so that I wouldn’t be caught
in the house with the trees
for the rest of my life.
Be a sister, a daughter.
Become a mother, a wife.
Without me, you wilted.
You stayed locked in your room.
You wouldn’t eat, wouldn’t sleep.
You crept to the tomb.
They took the lock off your door
because they were afraid
of finding you dead
in the room where we prayed
for a chance to escape
when we were just kids.
The way we tangled our hands
and crushed our eyelids.
I gave up on God
because he never felt there.
You clung to your faith,
though it was starting to wear.
I watched you decay,
become more and more lost.
I wanted you better
no matter the cost.
But we fell estranged
since the years spent in prayer.
I fled from the altar
but you stayed right there.
Beloved, my promise
was never to God.
My oath lies with you,
through even and odd.
Beloved, rise up!
Lead the life that you need.
Leave the pulpit and the pews
and the yellow house with the trees.
Sol
Child of salt and ash,
who are you today?
You, who can only look at me through strangers' eyes,
You, with the guarded glances that needle and prod.
Are you the same fawn I found?
Trapped in a burning thicket of thorns;
too young to recognize the smell of smoke,
too afraid to break past the hooks of your home?
I rescued you and you accepted me.
You swallowed my rage and anguish to sustain yourself
through the years of winters and unforgiving desert suns.
Oh child of clay and bark,
somehow you and I split desires.
I wanted to live past our pasts,
to lay the eggs of our memories and crush them underfoot.
But you, always so clever, always with something tucked away.
You, who remembered and sent us back to the forest we escaped.
I was angry and wanted you to be angry.
I was hurt and wanted you to hurt.
But you were so patient,
you ignored my slash and burn.
you waited for the cloak to fall
and my nakedness to envelop me in
the vulnerability I always sought to bury.
Today I stand with you,
regretting the ways I have been eagerly cruel,
even fervent in its movements:
the cutting down of your boughs,
the burning of your roots.
Our hands will never touch.
Our lips will never meet.
Separated by panes of glass and surfaces of water,
I will love you from afar.
You are so beautiful.
I say it now because I may never say it again.
And for that I am sorry and you are sorry,
and for that you forgive me and I forgive you.
You, with the dusky river eyes
You, with the birthmark dripping down your back.
You are so beautiful.
And above all that you are worthy.
You, whom I have always known.
You, whom I may never know.
Sunny Talero is a Colombian-American writer from New York. She studied at the City College of New York as a Macaulay Honors Scholar. After graduating summa cum laude and earning her Bachelor of Arts in Studio Art and English, Sunny decided to pursue her Master's degree in Language and Literacy at her alma mater. She dreams of one day opening her own pottery studio and publishing an anthology of modern magical-realist stories. @sunsplattered