Tiziana Rasile

You shouldn’t worry baby boy
            lips still hours away
from shame or consequence
            You say you’re a grown-up
now and you can want whatever you want
            and if you want
this swallow him within your
            slipping minutes
when the auto park
            just beyond these
fortress walls sits quietly in repose its
            steel skeletons
grinding night between their teeth
            a cemetery
filled with the dawn-bleached bones
            that sooner or later
you’ll weave through like contrails across
            blue bruise of sky
The morning will shiver in protest
            when you say goodbye
without a sound instead with looks
            of pang or envy
but for now the air is thick in your lungs
            the room vivisected
by a disco ball’s providential
            eye and all around you are
the faces of men you’ve come to memorize
            the way an apostle
would commit his sacred texts to heart
            If you want this
and who here is above wanting
            you must rest
your hand on the small of his back
            that same skin
which soon will unravel with steam
            warm clouds
lifting from his body in that instant
            when frost
first strikes heat those seconds
            where your names
will not matter below the
            impish creep of horizon’s blade
your bodies possessed even then
            by the bass
and the throbbing puncture
            of party-favored mania
scored by the key in any given
            bathroom stall
You shouldn’t worry because
            no one is dying
tonight at least no more than
            should be expected as the dark
peels away like a soiled bandage
            You are too young
still to worry about what you can’t control
            about what comes after or
next you see that is the langue of experience
            and baby boy
who are you to pick up such a tongue so soon
            Now you know what
you want even if you cannot name it
            so you pull him
into your trembling mouth’s
            ready chamber you
shake your limbs in ritual when
            at last the climax
arrives amidst that throng that great spasm
            that panicked
and orgiastic shedding of doubt
            among the sweat-drenched
congregation wearing their pained masks of pleasure
            Let it sink into the floor
flood the catacombs below your feet
            where men have spent
all night escaping what they’ve come
            to expect
If you mean it throw your stumbling weight
            into the heavy doors
the bottom of your shoes slick with
            a party’s afterbirth
Slip into day’s narrow path
            the wrath of waking sunlight
Baby boy forget how winter burrows
            beneath the skin
let your mouth hang open with
            that uncertain
steadiness just this once
            a devouring gasp
This morning is nothing more than
            early-bird traffic and
the frost’s filed teeth and the truth that
            you may never see
another quite like it for as long as you search
            this city’s streets but
baby boy show him with the last
            swell of your tongue
now so practiced in this carnivorous dance
            that this cannot last
forever Prove to him you know
            that is the point

I’m in a long, bright white tunnel,
I pretend I’m not in a coffin.
A prince whispers in my ear;
no, it’s actually Prince –
These paper shorts feel scratchy
and the way they are slightly 
twisted off-center makes me
glad they are temporary. 
Isn’t everything temporary?
Let’s go crazy.
Hold still – as still as you can.
It’s the disembodied tenor voice 
of a digital wizard
Medicinal drums of the MRI
bang around me, humming
around the spaces in oversized 
headphones – my auditory shield.
Magnetic eyes scan my body
Let’s go crazy.
I wish I had worn socks.
There is a scuff mark in my
light tunnel, depreciating
its ethereal value, a fulsome bone white.
It’s a coffin again. I pretend
I am at peace. I can hear the machine
covering me with dirt. 
Let’s go crazy.
I’m not ready to go yet. Scan again.
Eyes closed, I attempt to make a human 
connection to the machine, as if
trying to lay myself bare –
vulnerable to its heated eyes.

There are no instructions for the slow, seismic shift of growing up between languages, only the gradual ache of realizing you are a creature of halves, a face that answers to two names while the mirror offers back a sentence forever cut short.

You moult and shift, a flicker passing through the cracks of translation, yet people rarely see the leaving; they mistake your silence for forgetting and your flutter for indecision, never realizing you are already inhabitng the “in-between.”

Most chances arrive in two tongues, usually a beat too late to choose, leaving you to rehearse a private freedom in Spanglish—an elective exile that feels simultaneously like an escape and a return. You begin to gather the symptoms of this displacement like uncollated notes: memory becomes a border crossing and belonging feels like a passport that was never stamped, and looking back, you realize that your stillness was merely survival, though it doesn’t quiet the panic that rises when both flags finally hang still in the wind.

The answer, if it exists, refuses to speak; instead, it burns with a quiet, hungry heat that flickers beneath thick accents and those phrases that refuse to be carried across the line.

It is a soft light surviving its own contradictions, the rhythm of something alive in two directions at once; a constant, rhythmic ping-pong of sí and yes, of ni modo and maybe, the echo of a word chasing its own shadow. To speak is to never quite know which tongue holds the absolute truth, to write dusk and then crepúsculo and realize they describe two entirely different heavens.

Some days are measured only by the wait between customs lines, like a farmer gauging the soil between his strawberries and the distant fence, realizing that the moon above him is already bilingual and that there is a profound, silent peace in finally refusing to choose; in letting the land translate itself.

They climb the ridge together, careful not to disturb the desert hush, understanding now that curiosity is a path with two names and that the valleys behind them are destined to blur.

At the summit, they find no finality, only a mesquite tree spreading wide, its leaves speaking the shared vernacular of sky and soil.

The children followed those leaves once, each step a word in a language they hadn’t yet mastered, every path a return to a place they had never actually left, their history threading their tongues like a long, shared breath. This was the secret they stumbled upon: that awe, when properly placed, makes the body invisible to sorrow.

I watch them now through the slant of memory, letting their eyes become mine until I hear the mountains speaking in a multi-hearted code, a miracle repeated so often it begins to sound like a lullaby. Nature is borderless, yes, but it is also painstakingly specific, and we find we can belong in more than one place at once. There are other names for this—dichos, refranes, prayers whispered into the wind; but sometimes it is enough simply to walk and listen to the oldest trees murmuring between breaths.

The rain knows where to fall, favoring the late afternoons and perfuming the mesquite before the sky clears, and when the sun rises sharp and blue, you see how tender the city has become. It is not broken, merely translated, as if the sky left its mouthprint across the rooftops and the mind, astonished, keeps layering more, realizing that knowing in two languages makes the imagination thicker, wilder, and infinitely more resilient.

Which leaves us with the only question that remains: Is it a kind of blessing, this constant knowing without ever needing to know that we know?