Barbara Varanka
Her mind, decorated
Incantations dropped from her lips
like broken plates. She piled decadence
upon herself — spoonfuls — to escape.
Memory was a leather heel
stuck in cobblestone. More than wild
strawberries, she expected nothing,
no one to kiss her pale blue hair.
First snow fell on Krakow roofs.
The difference between te amo and te quiero
In Mexico, he was a gaucho
built of dust and blood and rattlesnake skin,
all caramel forearms and scars,
faded pink tattooed slashes through lip and brow.
White desert ranches taught him to work
the pocketknife. He shot a pregnant serpent
with a pistol, split her belly in two deep drags.
That night he was a hero. Silver coins washed in,
slipped from the mouths of hermanos gone
north in bright moondrunk waves
They called. From the backseat floor, America
was blue and purple. She named herself
new wife, a bedbug-laced ghetto that ate him
alive, all square body and manos indocumentados
that held a white girl for a lousy, soulless bachata
in the crepe-paper littered corner of a dance hall
on Independence Avenue. Oh, te quiero or te amo:
both are soft and green and dissolve on the tongue
into broken discs. What does it matter what he says
to his gabacha.
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Barbara Varanka is a poet, essayist, and teacher. She lives and works in Kansas City, Missouri. Her work has previously been featured in Booth.