When I haven’t been touched in a long time, I bump into strangers on the street so I can feel their proximal phalanges wrap around my bicep and triceps in apology, and I always pay cash so I can feel the bones in the cashier’s wrist slip away from mine, like sand through the cracks of a well-made boardwalk. I sit at an angle on the subway, so I can feel my thighs rubbing against someone’s right patella. I take phone numbers from strange men so I can feel their hand pressed against my lumbar vertebrae as they talk themselves up (or in), and tell me lies about how I am the most beautiful thing they’ve ever seen; I tell them it’s all in my zygomatics and let it linger so that I know what it feels like when they move their hands down to the panniculis of my abdomen. I block the aisle at Duane Reade so you have to say excuse me, and feel my gluteus maximus as you intentionally press through. I have more strange men’s contact information than I could ever use in this lifetime. I won’t call, anyway; emotional availability is about as likely as riding next to Jesus Christ on the morning train. I tell myself that I ride you not because I love your cerebral cortex, but because of carnal desire and the way my thighs feel wrapped around the iliac crests of your hips, and I’ll never get over the way your mandible brushes against my inner thighs. When it’s over, your medulla oblongata keeps your breathing in perfect time with mine, and maybe God removed a lobe from our left lungs so that you could take my breath away. I let you see the way my mitral and triscuspid valves open and close for you, and I’m prepared for the sclerosis that comes when you’ll go; and you will go, because they always go. I could never stay or be stayed with, yet you’ve peeled me like an onion, and in the same way of that complex vegetable, you will cause my orbital sockets to fill with tears that I can’t hold back. I’m so tired of building walls around my heart, because they are getting so thick and there isn’t much more room left in my chest to allow the heaviness of concrete alongside the required room for breathing without cracking my ribs, and I can’t figure out which one is more important: normal sinus rhythm or blocking myself from a pain that the strongest of opioids does not yet know how to touch.

We crashed into each other outside of the Museum of Sex and then you hollered at me, so I spent nights with you, my knees and shoulders banging against plaster walls in what I like to think of as the only way you knew to show affection, but an extended exercise in stroking your ego is the more likely story. We would ride the subway for what felt like days. I’d fold myself into the envelope of your arms, and you would trace the nape of my neck with your lips, through my lion’s mane of hair. It is funny the things you remember; I remember the word burgundy and your fitteds, and the bottle of JD in my purse. I remembered your hand sliding down the flat of my stomach and you telling me that you loved the way I touched you. Remember the way we made up elaborate, extravagant stories for our fellow passengers about their ostentatious lives? In the morning when we caught our trains that launched us to what may as well have been separate ends of the universe, with Grand Central the axis on which we turn, I couldn’t help but wonder if we were both someone else on that train, what would our respective stories have been? I hope our storyteller would find a way to make you see the oceans in my eyes, and pull you away from the hustle, but I know no storyteller would do that; no storyteller ever could.  So holler at me if you see me, but don’t say my name.  When your voice slides over me like molasses, it just gets stuck, and I’m tired of pulling your name out of my hair.

He asked me what I thought of myself before I met
all of my past lovers, and I didn’t have an answer.
My entire sexual history flashed before me in that moment,
from the boy I laid with on the hammock when I was
seventeen and the way I gasped when his hands slid
between my thighs, to the Antiguan rock I met by the way
of the Bronx whose coffee I will always be the cream in,
to the only relationship I ever had, even if it was unsustainable,
issued with an expiry date that had been blurred out just
enough to make it unreadable. The men on Calle Ocho, whose
cocks slid into my mouth as easily as I slid out of my
jeans, the men who would sidle up to you like they just
knew. The only man I ever wanted to kiss for days
pressed himself into me on Miami Beach, while I debated
the pros and cons of following through with that whole
marriage thing with a man who didn’t make you feel half
as much as this one right here
and after he made me forget which language
I spoke, he covered me with a Cuban flag and made sure
I’d never get the taste of mojito out of my mouth. I hear
their voices now, Mira, mira esta jeva…que manguito
eres, mami! Te quiero comer el bollo … and my conscience
just shakes its head and asks me what kind of woman I was
that I let men talk to me like that? The only answers I
have are that no man had talked to me in so long that
the words they said made no difference; just the fact they
were talking was enough, until I told them to stop talking
so I could just feel, please let me remember what it is to feel.
The answer to the question reveals itself; what did I think
of myself? I didn’t. Circumstances made me attention-starved,
and I thought that when a man said he loved you he meant
it, but I don’t even know what love means anymore.
I thought that they could scrape me clean of all the emptiness
and rot, and I would stifle myself until I no longer knew who
I was if that meant I could have someone to hold me for a week, maybe
two. When I exited my marriage, a deflated tire where a
woman once stood, I realized I had turned myself into a
blank canvas in the hopes that someone would want me.
But what is desire? Is desire the ache I feel between my
legs when I yearn to be touched? Is desire a man who wants
to get his dick wet and I am that convenient hole? Or is desire
the feeling of touching down after you’ve journeyed
to faraway galaxies in my eyes? I want concrete next time; I
want algorithms and hypotheses, so I can be
really sure he loves me. I know I can’t get that, that I can’t
ask that much. I have to open the trusting muscle, I have to
stop fixing this busted up chain link fence around my
heart. I need to scrape off the white paint on the canvas,
that which obscures the vibrant colors underneath. I need something
to believe in, and if I have to cling to something, I’m going
to cling to the belief that you’ll be there waiting when I do.

The fetal heart starts to quiver at eighteen
days gestation, and three days later it is pumping
blood ferociously in a closed circulatory system,
and I can’t pinpoint exactly when mine started to
break. My father says to stay off men with the same
austerity he would use if he were warning me
to stay off coke, or to put down the bottle. He
says he is tired of finding my heart on his dinner
plate, a cheap replacement to the steak he’d
rather be tearing into, and he says
his freezer is so full of the psyches
I took from the guilty parties that he has no room for food.
I tell him that it makes sense, then, that he has
gotten so thin, and hours later I am wrapping my
thighs around some beautiful boy’s neck, as if this
is the way to sustain any kind of meaningful
relationship, when he said “how YOU doin’?” to
the honest yearning muscle between my legs
before he ever looked into my eyes. I really wanted his tongue
osculating new phonemes into my lungs upon which
I could build the morphemes I haven’t yet articulated.
In reality, it’s easier to lie back and make eyes at
the peeling wallpaper in a stranger’s bedroom than
it is to hold a compelling conversation with someone
who says they care. I execute my role on
the stage that was built for me, because no one ever
gave me the tools with which to construct my own.
I used to wonder why people smoke after sex,
and everyone always said that it was because they
did it too hard, but I learned rather quickly that
it was because there’s really nothing to say to a
man who can’t look into your eyes, and the long
draws off of a cigarette give me more emotional
satisfaction than the shell of a human next to me
in bed ever could, when the only semi-useful words he
can muster are, “Damn, girl…you was built for fucking.”
My mother tells me that I am better than this; I am
better than strangers on street corners, and I am better
than torn up bar stools. I’ve demanded better, and all I got was
this t-shirt and a losing lotto ticket, along with the
attenuation that solitude leaves one with. My father
now dozes off during dinner. The thumping
of my heart against the ribcage of my bedroom walls
keeps him up at night; instead of engaging
in a strenuous search for someone who doesn’t
widen the crevices, I’ve learned to just leave that
trusting muscle behind instead of bringing it with
me to parties it had no business crashing in the first place,
because there isn’t room for three in bed once my hair
is fanned out across the pillows and I’ve reduced
myself to nothing more than a pile of limbs
in desperate need of untangling.

I wanted to make love to you with my
words, but they kept getting caught in the swell
of my lips. I’ve skipped stones across the surface
as an SOS, but I can’t reach you. It’s not for lack
of trying that I’m sending these packets of paper
via certified mail. You said, “I can’t believe that
you don’t even want to try,” and my throat closed
up like anaphylaxis. I choked, sternly informing
you that you checked out long ago, and I
was simply pulling the bandaid off that wound
so we could both heal. Love is a verb, and so
is lip service; but talk is cheap and you were
always better at that than love because any
real emotional investment was simply
too overwhelming for the machismo
beat of your heart. It’s funny-sad how all the
women before me were sluts and whores,
and as soon as I no longer wanted you, I
rose to the top of their ranks. I rode out the
wave hoping to find the key to my Pandora’s
box of emotion that I threw away long ago.
The best I could do was to look Hispaniola
in the eye the first time I came with him,
and as he collapsed into my chest, and
his hands grasped me like he was begging
at the breast of life, I saw a look in his eyes
that screamed of defeat. It was the same
look I saw in the dirty glass of the bathroom
mirror every day that I woke up next to you,
an empty shell, a parasite sucking me dry
so that no one ever noticed your own hollowness,
which became all too clear when I cut off the
blood flow, allowing that hornet in my head
the rest for which it had been begging for years.

This origami heart of mine has been crushed under the
weight of your hollowness too many times to count. I
have folded and unfolded myself in hopes for a more
tolerable version. I have tried to rid myself
of sharp edges and abrasive surfaces, but my jaw still
stiffens when you say my name. I have learned to
duck when a man reaches out for me. I have learned
to walk with a blade in my lip. I have folded one
thousand cranes and lit them on fire hoping for
something to fill your shell. But I cannot. No, I will
not. Not anymore. Loving yourself was the last
thing you were good at, and I came after, or
not at all. I was always second rate, second place,
a shadow to your ego that always needed stroking.
Go. Just go.
So you did, but I need you to come
back to take your emptiness with
you. It is still blood on the walls, the heart
shaped wound in my thigh. It is still the weight
on my chest, and I need to escape this iron lung.
Even if the weight of the world crushes my ribs,
at least I will have remembered how to break
chains loose and feel my spirit wrap itself around me.

It is five o’clock in Callao and it’s
getting dark and there’s a piece of
me somewhere on this sidewalk that
I can’t find, and you are of no help,
you are of no use.
You are just The Peruvian now. A face
that floats into a crowd in Lima, a voice
that echoes in an alley in el Rímac, a palm
tree in San Borja. I was always so sad
with you, and I didn’t know why. I thought
it was me, a missing jigsaw puzzle piece that
would be found under a neighbors sofa in a year
or two. It was never me. In the end, it became
a lot of you as you lashed out and I withdrew
so deep into myself that there are moments that
I still don’t remember my name, like the millisecond
of time between the changing film reels.
The happy moments were with your sisters in Lima.
Pisco sours and anticuchos in Barranco
and then we went to that bar that used to be a
home from your colonial-era, and I could swear that
I still have the business
card in a purse somewhere. I was digging
through my jewelry box for a pair of earrings,
and I found my rings and for a second it was almost amnesiac,
whose are these? Where did they come from? And the
soles were at the bottom, and I remembered paying for
lúcuma ice cream with them at Larcomar, the
breeze whispering into my hair.
I remember your Tío Pepe and how he
treated me like I’d always wished you did. Belly laughs.
Hermosísima. Tia Flor and the jewelry she gave me.
La Chata and the way she gripped me and told me
nunca olvides, tú eres una mujer bellísima. Empanadas
with your sister, and that little cafe right near her apartment.
Challe and how he made that entire dinner to welcome me
to his country. Your sister and I hanging out windows on
either side of the china cabinet, fumando y hablando, and
all of Lima lay before us. Julio showing me how to find the
perfect mango. He is the reason I never buy mangoes
anymore. The hole-in-the-wall restaurant in Sirquillo
where we ate chicharrones with pan francés. The human
bones under la iglesia de San Francisco, and how I wanted to
climb in with them. All the promises you made. Punto Azul
restaurant with your entire family, the fans blowing in my hair,
a band-aid over the problem. I still couldn’t stop sweating
and you through gritted teeth telling me to finish all of my
food, even though you knew how sick I was, because Tía
Perla was paying, and please, I don’t want my mother finding
out how ungrateful you are. Standing at the edge of
Larcomar and wondering if I jumped, would I go headfirst into
the rocks, or would God give me wings with which to fly away?
A disagreement in the park, your voice filled with contempt
telling me to stop behaving like a child, I was only mad
because I liked being mad. The smack that echoed in my
head as my open palm hit your cheek. The apologies I made.
The man who walked past me and groped my breasts through
my shirt, and how you mocked me for being as shaken
as I was. Yelling at me to say my d’s, you are married to
a Peruvian and not a Cuban, don’t you ever learn? Don’t
look at my cousin like that, I know how you American women
are. Coffee and a suspiro limeño with your sisters, and you
looking me up and down, and well, I hope you didn’t eat too
much. You need to look good for me. Whining about
having to get up early to take me to the airport.
Sitting with your brother as he told me how to stay safe in
Bogotá; pointers I didn’t really need but I appreciated the
gesture, anyway. I went to go catch my plane and when I turned
around to say goodbye, you were already gone. Your
brother waving and smiling,¡adiós, que te regreses
bien pronto! ¡Un día vaya yo a ir a tu país!
You were impatient on the sidewalk. You
could never wait to get away, and I still mean
the things I didn’t say.

You smelled like money when you pulled me out of the
Hudson, threw me a life raft in the form of a hundred
dollar bill. I wasn’t worth the 5 or 6 hours you spent
breathing the life back into me, as it’s all but
escaped by now. There’s an ache in me that even
fast food, JD, and nicotine haven’t succeeded at quelling,
and the familiarity of being comfortably numb beneath you has
worn off, and I don’t know which way to turn in
this dark room. Either way I go, I feel the reminders
in your knees, your elbows. My entire body is a jagged
edge, and there’s nothing left. I am an open wound.
They say that when I’m
happy, there’s a light inside of me that lights up, but I
haven’t felt the warmth of that light in years, and when you asked
me for proof that God doesn’t exist, I directed you into my eyes for
evidence that can’t be translated into any language.
You nodded softly and walked away as I sat on that staircase
that the entire world recognizes. It’s all there.
I was all the proof you ever needed.

They say I am a feeler
and today
it is all saudade.

inuit child, my fearless dancer.  let us not forget what happened here. lying in the grass, you are chasing birds you will never catch and disappointment is not a lesson that I am willing to teach today.  your father, slipping in and out of psychosis, will teach you about disappointment.  your mother will teach you about how empty filling your life full with cotton stuffing, like your existence is a misshapen teddy bear, makes you feel on the inside.  let us not forget what has happened here.  we will plan grand adventures through the back yard, where every blade of grass is an entire rainforest, and a decorative water fountain is the best entertainment for miles.  we draw our hopes and dreams in Crayola on the walls and wash it off before your grandmother sees.  frozen tater tots are the only thing you ever ask for, and you are so pure, untouched by insecurity and self-doubt  that a request to smile for the camera is fulfilled with lips spread so wide that your carotid and jugular tighten against your skin and your eyes are forced shut under the shine of that smile. million dollar baby, you can lie on top of me as we peer through the cat door looking for cat-cat's paws.  let us not forget.  the smell of sunscreen, a toddler's wet kisses on the nape of one's neck or the arch of one's cheek, flying above a spinning garden sprinkler, hobbling across stepping stones and always making sure I am no more than three steps behind. "'Thena, c'mon!" is a broken record that turns into a beautiful melody. let us not forget. handprints in concrete stepping stones, dirt between the toes.  you are an archaeologist here, finding artifacts of years past where I did not feel every breath like an overpowering ache.  if there is a God, he must be kind and loving to have sent me a savior in Elmo footie pajamas.  I needed this as much as you did.  I have to leave all too soon and I wish I could take you wish me and make sure you are always safe.  let us not forget what we have learned here about unassuming, no-strings-attached love, spelled out by a toddler’s excited shrieking of my name.  there is no good enough, there is no being better to get what you deserve.  there is never enough time. there just is.  eli ry ty.  let us not forget how the heart always remembers how to keep beating.

I know you won’t remember any of these days, scribbling in oversize Dora the Explorer coloring books or bouncing around in the backyard, trying to catch all the birds that you never will, where you won’t go too far without looking behind you to make sure I am there, where “thena! c’mon!” is a broken record that never stops playing, splashing in the kiddie pool and running through the sprinkler, but I will and I hope they can change something, increase your chances of surviving two parents who never deserved you, not for one second. I have to leave soon, and I wish I could take you with me and make sure you are safe always. I hope I can somehow reach out and touch you, and it is like the God that I am not sure I believe in most days knew we needed each other.

My heart is breaking.

I would like to take you to the ends of the earth to keep you away from growing up with a mother with only a few brain cells to rub together who only sees you as a trophy and the occasional family court chess piece and a father who spends more time in psychosis than out and who acts like he doesn’t really want you around a lot of the time.

But I can’t. So let’s lie on the floor together and peer through the cat door and talk to the cat who peers back at us and eat frozen tater tots and have grand adventures in the backyard this weekend. I will pretend that it can make some kind of difference in how my heart breaks.

"Anyone worth knowing breaks once.
Once.
No shame, no foul if you survive it."

what we are not told is that it is never a clean break.
it can never be stitched up
in the way that a surgeon with impeccable attention to detail
weaves the stitches
in and out, and over and under.
I cannot hide this scar you left when you drove the knife right into my chest
and twisted,
reversing the flow of blood through the heart.
I ask people to touch it, can they feel my heart beating beneath it?

My heart.
I don't wear it so much on my sleeve as I encase myself in it.
I am pulsing and throbbing, squeezing every breath out of life.
They hold me up at school assemblies.
This is your heart, and the mitral valve opens and closes,
and if you pay close enough attention you can see my soul tumble out.

I have tried to harden myself, toughen myself up
like the nicotine-hardened heart of the life-long smoker.
I gave up smoking a long time ago,
and all of that aside, people break from yearning, too.

In this room, right now, I can feel all of us
beating in perfect time.
While my mother always told me that I was too sensitive,
needed to learn to
laugh at myself,
toughen up &
grow a thicker skin,
I want no part in any of that.
The electricity that runs right through me
when I don't clear the person passing me in the stairwell
is what keeps me alive.

This only breaks you once.
Once.
Somewhere in breaking, you learn that if you want to be
someone who is trusted,
you need to be someone who trusts.

Your eyes are so empty.

Hold me tightly. Trace this scar in my chest.

It means I am still alive.

my mother tells me that I don’t need to tell
everyone
everything
I feel in the very moment I feel it.
but these words pound against my ribs,
and not the easily displaced floating ones,
but the true ones, stiff with desire.

so I don’t. I don’t tell you

how when you call me mami or nena,
my legs are as good as spread,
and how sometimes I stand at the Macy’s cologne counter
and smell your cologne, just so
I can remember how it is to take you in

how when I haven’t spoken Spanish in a long time,
the line between Spanish & English is as solid as the Berlin Wall,
but when you speak Spanish to me, you are Ronald Reagan.
& de repente, I’m at work, peering out a window, telling a coworker
dile que está lloviendo y...be careful when driving in the rain

how when these days pass and I don’t hear much from you,
I miss your voice, and could do without this unbearable ache
to wear you inside like a wall decoration

how when you tell me you love my intelligence,
it turns me on more than your hands on my body ever will,
and how we can just stay here all day instead of going out,
because I feel safe here with you and besides,
my books are here

until the words come pouring out
and I’m Harry and you’re Sally

and you’re telling me how funny it is
that you were always too scared to tell me
how you can’t stop looking at my legs because
you can’t stop imagining them wrapped around you

and you could just listen to me talk
for days