Fuera menos penado si no fuera

1. SAGRADO: The storms here fill me with a blend of exhilaration and fear that crystallizes heavy and clammy over my thoughts, resting on my heart like unfamiliar cities, or unattainable love. But the air inside Briana’s car is warm, and I feel so safe, as though I am being taken by the hand and led through the delicate, gentle motions of a dance. Her minivan chugs steady and unfailing towards a horizon of ash, along the highway into the darkening apex of an evening saturated in slate and violet, and clouds move through the sky like seawater over calves, and subdued, languid rain falls, and falls, and falls.

2. SANGRIENTO: Pain is a place, and it has my mother’s eyes.  The air hums low, and the tunnels are aglow, lined with round neon lights like fragrant yellow roses.

3. SACIADO: I am sitting sandwiched in the backseat of a mustard sedan; the roads are lined first with a carmine and currant sunset, and then a viscous, starless night. The Bulgarian lily, the shadow in the water, the ache in my belly, the hour between, the low blow I, in an inevitable moment of weakness, have forgiven — in other words, the woman I love — she sits beside me. I want to take her by the shoulders. I want to put the world away, or at least reduce it until it exists only as an inchoate blur of roseate and saffron hair, framed in the dark by the passing of golden sodium vapor lamps and tricolor headlights. I want to tell her I’ve been asking God for someone like her ever since the dove left the ship for the shore.