Unburdening

I wait for you in a room
where the howls of dogs are mute.
Here, where there's no flight.
Where the clock gathers your eyelashes
with its tongue.

I wait for you without daybreak,
naked because everything is hunger,
thirsty because you have named everything.

I wait for you as your mother fills
my forehead with kisses. She discovers
my poverty and her tongue turns to foam
when she says I am lucky.

There's no such thing as luck.
There's waiting and this life
that never shuts up. It falls in love
with my blood.

Owns the cry that I swallow.

Copyright © 2009 Octavio Quintanilla All rights reserved
from Fugue
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission