Luceros

by Jose Oseguera

​

Our clothes slid from our skin

As did sun’s shoulders into the sea.

Wading naked,

Waist-deep and wrapped

By warmth of stars—

Floating through our tentacled fingers,

Between our collective thighs

 

As fireflies carousing night’s muggy breath—

I dipped my hand gently

As to not startle the droplets suckling

My skin cracks into its calm,

 

And took your womb like a water jug—

Bone lined with mud

Soft as silt,

Kilned by the afterday.

 

The black veil above us

Obscured the liquid sloshing

In and out of your clay.

I took a deep swig of it—

 

Thick, pungent clumps, briny in taste—

And continued to drink

Until the blood surrounding us,

Blotting from within you,

Had been consumed.

 

Swaying its contours again through water,

It glowed as fire,

Thirsty for star-nectar

That scuttled away in swarms.

 

The more light I captured with your lightness,

The darker the darkness

Surrounding my pupils.

When I placed the womb

Back in your body,

 

It turned night into day,

The water into milk,

And the stars into long ribbons

Of wild mountain honey,

Brown, bitter as it was golden, sweet.

 

You combed its glimmering as you unspooled

A golden thread from your navel—

Blonder than the blondest strand of your hair—

And crocheted a new soul with it,

 

One that would be his:

A new flame lit by a litany

Sung in Magyar and Nahuatl—

Sister tongues braided, burning as one.

 

Your solar plexus grew brighter and brighter—

As a red giant from a nebula—

Beneath your full moon breasts

Cratered thick of translucent milk veins

 

To nourish his defenselessness

Into luminescence:

Light from light,

True life from true life.

 

Nothing could’ve sparked his brilliance

As did the constellations

Swimming in our bloods—

Only light can make light—

 

Nothing would be able to extinguish it

As the stars in the sky

Which were no longer there—

But were black and white pictures

Taken millions of lifetimes before

 

When they lived and loved—

Young, beautiful, celestial—

Standing before each other

As they never would again,

Their echoes left behind like gossip

In the vast nothingness.