From ‘M of the Southern Downpours’

A guy is naked in my shower in a room assigned by the receptionist who doesn’t know I knew about the dead woman found half-naked, hands tied in the same room, two years ago. 

He doesn’t have a name. I never asked. They always lie about their age. But I call him Cy. Cy said he doesn’t come fast. 

Cy is now in my bed. So as I reside in his navel, the smell of baby powder, I see your goatee in his chin, your jawline at the edge of his. 

You see, I desire strangers with parts of you: a porn actor with your body build, an anonymous Grindr user with your name, a passenger on the jeepney wearing your shoes, a mutual whose tweets I read in your voice, someone on Tinder in your favorite shirt.

At the back of this roadside motel, shadowed by a jackfruit tree with its fruit wrapped in a sack, Cy and I smoke while three generations of neighborhood mothers play mahjong behind a wall topped with barbed wire or some shards of colored bottles broke by their drunkard husbands.

The city says nothing beyond this limit, afraid some shards touch the sky, cause a crash of an airplane we used to run after as kids. Los pájaros en los círculos abiertos del aire caliente. Los humanos en los círculos abiertos del sueño. En el valle, las sombras [1]. Didn’t they change the room numbers since the murder? To confuse the living which room to avoid, to confuse the dead which room to haunt. 

And so he muffles my moans by covering my mouth, a silver on his ring finger jolting my tooth. I clench his nape, some soft dark animal, easing the tremors of our own making. I always thought I was more of a breather, less a moaner. So I would not know the silence of the dead; I never visit them, they never visit me.

Sometimes I yearn for Cy, for men who are not you.

[1] Birds in the open circles of hot air. / Humans in the open circles of dreams. / In the valley, the shadows. From Gaspar Orozco’s “El libro de los Espejismos” (The Book of Mirages), translated from the Spanish by Ilana Luna.