Discretionary Love

Love snuck in slowly, walking barefoot— a thief in the night, stealing fragments of myself before I even noticed. Your smile— as pure as the first dewdrop. Your laughter— the melody hidden inside each moment. We lingered in each other’s presence, savoring every second— a banquet of sweetness, unending, seemingly still, time suspended in memory, vanished, yet vivid. Each day, small things unfold, tied by a delicate thread, held within the net of our hopes and fears— woven together, subtle, and breakable. Love, once a distant dream, now lives within our hearts. We taste wild honey

Or rather you don’t know That I am the type who falls in love Who will dribble you in my sleep And look for your

Your mother told me how the rain came down in sheets the morning you were born too soon in the back of a station wagon,

Today I found the path she had so long worked to clear swallowed up by prairie grasses. I’d watched her felling trees and grinding stumps,

A mosaic is forming, A sprinkle of unplanned smiles, an equal amount of denial One part butterflies, an elephant to complement the rest A generous

When I was six years old and my familia was living in Pittsburgh Pennsylvania on Thomas Boulevard, my madre got very ill, and my hermano

Martyr me      on the first day of autumn     when morning tastes     of salt and death     and the

Last name was Notario never knew their first names. I was a cashier summer job restaurant by the Bay. He would come in first take

When we were kids an alley separated our houses, you were the new girl; all exotic from the city, your dad didn’t have calluses; called