Brenda Cárdenas

When I sigh
I am breathing you
back out of me.
Like smoke you pause,
then fleet, melt into air.
You are often this intangible,
the silent e of love
or hache of hábito.
Háblame, you say,
yet my next breath
draws you in with the air
hissing past teeth
because I do not know
where I want you
or what you are veiling
in the semantics of loss.

The hush of your hands
reaches me from every shadow.
You kiss the slats of skin open
to the striped dawn
of the window blind.
You kiss these warm l's
of light and depart.

In the caesura between hours and days,
weeks, I stroke watercolors.
The blue sinks deep
as the resonant pitch
of your vocal chords,
an anaphora of waves
lapping to the shore
until the paper is satiated.
I am not.

We work in English,
make love in Spanish
and code-switch past our indecisions.
On days filled with your absence,
I think in sinalefas
and trace you in the ring left
by my morning coffee cup.
If only I could touch
the amber circles of your eyes,
kiss your liquid pupils
when they dilate, enticed.
Then I'd be inside of you
as you so easily
fall into me.

I'd feel the constriction
of an x we cannot name,
the multi-lingual moan of o's,
tense Spanish vowels
awaiting release.
Then the loose
twirling of an erre down our spines,
down the soft sides of our arms,
líquidas vibrantes
of our blood.
This is how I want you--
at once within
and without
like a breath,
a sigh,
a language.

Previously published in Inhabiting the Body: A Collection of Poetry and Art by Women, Nina Corwin and Mary H. Ber, eds., Moon Journal Press, 2002.