Your language, your food, dancing salsa in the clubs,
all the brown-eyed boys with loose hips
eager to take their hands and place them
just there or there along the smooth
soft places inside me, your city streets
and cathedrals, the casa de la cultura
with its wide open patio and tiny stone rooms,
an old nunnery where black widow spiders
suspended themselves in bathroom stalls
exposing their red-marked abdomens
to all the ladies sitting there with panties down
around their ankles.
Your art, your stories, your stature, beneath mine
both in height and all the other ways,
except of course your masculinity
about which you would at times remind me
red-faced in your language, which was now
our language, which was now the foreign language
in the country where we lived.
Your heart—you might say—but you gave
that up freely, put it in my mouth like
slices of ripe mango, begged me to swallow
one piece after the other until I was
red-lipped, sated, smiling at the way
I didn't even need to use my teeth.
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