Kissing kissing long and slow and meditatively, kissing her lips
and her eyelashes, her gums, her tongue, her eyes--
she tastes, all other girls they only taste
like cigarettes, compared. She has the smell of mist on a fall

night, and I love her so much I could lie on my back just holding
her hand for the rest of my life. She’s adopted: it’s fine, she says, but
God I only want to know if my smile I got from my mother.
She deserves to know, God, if you’re here, if you’re listening, where that black

gold smile comes from.
Kissing, kissing long smooth and kissing hard those striking
flashing pupils—burning glances frozen in silence—
God knows she got them somewhere.

Once I lost her; I drove drunk down midnight alleys smashing,
when her lips came up, a glass sculpture of myself on the dash, and
when her teeth came up, another glass sculpture, and another
when her throat came up until I was knee deep in shattered glass.

And I was the powdered glass remains, wind-scattered on the air
over the moaning sea. But piece by jagged piece, her tender fingers
puzzled me back together, and now I view her reflection and mine inter-
woven on the ruddy cheeks of our children. In their radiant laughs laughs
the voice of their grandmother, her undying eyelids shut

when they sleep, her fingers ball in fists during fits, and her song
chimes when tears squeeze out; their abuela’s, skin, lungs, and spirit.

Did God ever whisper to my lover’s unborn spirit, she’d
be stolen out of Guatemala, and with every thought she’d miss
her mother like hell? But she said she’d come anyway, cross over,
and bring a lonely couple love.

Certain nights, she feels her mother’s soft, sun-worn hands holding lovingly
her tiny face, and it warms her, and it warms her, until she sometimes
goes back to being the only living dead person on the planet.
Kissing her, kissing, caressing,

there’s a sad and primal wish to be mothered, powerful, like a five-year-old
girl skipping rope at burning sunset. Kissing, I’m lost
kissing her like a ball bouncing down a long dark hall, I pray in God’s
presence and with his most beautiful angels weeping mother and daughter

shall be reunited. Whether or not, Father, she inherited anything, if love
is real and true and you are love and you are here
living and breathing in our hearts, then I have no reason to doubt
that she will one day get to see our sweet abuela smiling, and then,
my Lord, she can judge for herself.

Family,clan,
community,country,ethnicity;
to consolidate my identity,
often,I betray humanity;
at times,it may be a necessity,
in general,it is tyranny!
They have no sanctity,
it is all about you and me.
No,no, he is not dead,
beware the demon!
he is you and me.