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IV

Santa Marta catches light and puts it on like jewelry for onlooking mountain towns to envy or admire.

I’ve seen natural landscapes that break you up with their beauty, shards of it sticking through your ribs.

I’ve been way, way up in the mountains. I’ve looked down at arterial rivers, at sun-warmed water reservoirs, at concavity reaching deep into the planet’s gut.

I’ve been at a sea level backfloat, looking up at the untouchable sky. Day, the clouds do their shapes. Late, the stars blink in every direction, somebody’s far-off disco.

Still, there is nothing that rings me out, stretches me wide, or knocks me back the way that coming upon a city, lit by the sun or its own electricity, does. I remember it somewhere in Utah, in Los Angeles, and there it was in Medellin, and here it is again in Santa Marta. This city glitter puts big sky and a clean coast to shame.

Why? There are people in there.

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V

No glass water
this water’s rough
I can see a me mirrored in it, still

A swimmer of the stroke
that keeps me in place, not
a stroke at all, or
a stroke called Try

I am a working girl
at a dog’s paddle against a howling
moon’s pull, a stroke called Try

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‍

VI

We drank hot fruit wine with sugar on the rims and talked about the pharmaceuticals we never wanted to need. We blurred the bar’s colors through welled tears. Our throats were tight with profound, unspeakable understanding. We were not a mirror but variations of the same girl. Looking at one another and calling it “home” or calling it “horizon”, we found the magical reality of that place. I thought about dying right there with you at eight p.m. our time. I thought about my debt sorting itself out and everything else going according to my will, as your eyes, the color of a brand new US dollar, borrowed me from full consciousness.