I


Panama 
by la guarani

I wanted so bad for you
cherry red skin boy with smooth hips cleaving
water   surrounded by a hurricane of children shouting your ohso
melodious name
wanted so bad for you to understand
my broken Span   glish
syllables of overheated/natural/ indoor flesh interrupted by a gray city
where walls hold cold
that seeps into the marrow of my bones.

I wanted so bad for you
who had never stuttered in harsh wind comin down broadway Januaries
to show me how to dance
without glidin steps being cut short
by bullet hail stop n start poppin an lockin
Wanted to dissolve into a round moon late nite rerun   travel brochure
slow note   temperate breeze dream with you
in a picture postcard place
my parents had run from years ago
in search of Cadillacs.
Wanted so bad for you 
to identify my frozen limbs caught out in a 3 am doorway huddlin into
a Newport    listenin to a jail song escapin from the 5th floor
of a crumbling collection of cockaroaches, fadin skin
and sazon held like a sacrament in tight packed jars.
Wanted you to identify this body
washed up on your consecrated dream like shore
as your own
waited for you to recognize the line of home in the creases of my body
thought you could let me believe I was made of this same sugar as you
who
never really left these
fragrant ancestral groves 

but you just
envied my winter skin and wanted to wear my american bubble coat in 80
degree weather like it was the first day of school and
you called me white names     axed me for money    and me bein la gringa 
there was no spider web left after all to tie me to you
across an ocean where hope drowns 
somebody dropped the cord somewhere along the line that was supposed to
allow our sprint/at&t $10 phonecard connection
and all your elegant body flitting across Hato Pintado became was
replayed TV movies pouring regular blue light into my 
almost silent chill-drawn bedroom
static crackled into walls where it peeled paint and 
frayed the quilt with midnight anxious hands
that I pulled up into the edge of an ebony nite 
studded only by boomboom lickashot
and the red warm clinging canesweet blood of my little
brother   hiding razors on his singin tongue.
I wanted so bad for you
to understand,
to unlearn me my edges.
                                     la guarani

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