We were pelican-throated, carried
humpback mountains, a sea glass city, scales cut
from moon memory.
We’d wake like grass swollen from rainwater, bodies
blooming stupid drunk summers of late night swims,
legs bicycling in jeweled darkness.
We were more animal then, scent of sunday parrillas
on us, our laughs maniac and loose, broken open
with music.
We didn’t know then about earth and its one bedrooms
and long phone cords and drywall skies and single moms
and TV microwaved rooms.
We didn’t know about roots snapping, lands flooding, tectonic
plates shifting, about washing the same plate over and over lost
in an old memory’s spell.
We didn’t know about the hooks in our mouths now
or the taste of metal.
When the student I am tutoring in spanish asks
the difference between pez y pescado, I don’t offer
my memory of us in the cable car suspended in a sky raining
light, I don’t offer our old bodies that hang elsewhere,
more alive.
Previously published in The Colorado Review
