The Poet X(17)

What I Don’t Tell Aman


I can’t date.

I can’t be seen on my block with boys.

I can’t have a boy call my cell phone.

I can’t hold hands with a boy.

I can’t go to his house.

I can’t invite him to mine.

I can’t hang out with him and his friends.

I can’t go to the movies with any boy other than Twin.

I can’t go to teen night at the club.

I can’t have a boyfriend.

I can’t fall in love.

Whenever we text late at night I avoid mentioning making plans.

I tell him “I just want to live in the moment.”

Because I don’t want to tell him all the things I can’t do.

But I also shouldn’t kiss a boy in the smoke park . . .

and yet, I did that, too.





Kiss Stamps


Later, when I walk into confirmation class I know I’m wearing Aman’s kiss like a bright red sweater.

Anyone who looks at me

will know I know what it means to want.

In that way. Because I didn’t want to stop kissing.

And we didn’t.

Until his hands moved under my shirt and I jumped at the chill.

Maybe I jumped at something else.

Guilt? How fast we’re moving?

I don’t know, but I knew it was time to stop.

But I didn’t want to.

I mean, I guess I did.

It’s confusing to know you shouldn’t be doing something, that it might go too far,

but still wanting to do it anyway.

I don’t whisper with Caridad, or make eye contact with anyone, or question Father Sean,

or look at the cross

bearing an all-knowing God who, if he exists, saw everything, everything that happened in the smoke park.

And how much I enjoyed it.





The Last Fifteen-Year-Old


Okay. I know. It’s not that deep to kiss a guy.

It’s just a kiss, some tongue, little kids kiss all the time, probably not with tongue (that’d be weird).

Boys have wanted to kiss me

since I was eleven, and back then I didn’t want to kiss them.

And then it was grown-ass boys, or legit men,

giving me sneaky looks, and Mami told me I’d have to pray extra so my body didn’t get me into trouble.

And I knew then what I’d known since my period came: my body was trouble. I had to pray the trouble out of the body God gave me. My body was a problem.

And I didn’t want any of these boys to be the ones to solve it.

I wanted to forget I had this body at all.

So when everyone in middle school was playing truth or dare, or whatever other excuse to get their first kiss, I was hiding in big sweaters, I was hiding in hard silence, trying to turn this body into an invisible equation.

Until now. Now I want Aman to balance my sides, to leave his fingerprints all over me. To show all his work.





Concerns


Father Sean asks me if things are going well?

And for a second, I think he knows about the kiss.

That through some divine premonition

or psychic ability . . . he knows.

But then I see him glance at the altar

at the covered chalice full of wine,

the plate holding the soft circles of the body of Christ.

I’m fine. I’m fine. I’m fine. I don’t say.

I just shrug. And look anywhere else.

“We all doubt ourselves sometimes,” he tells me.

I look him straight in the eye: “Even you?”

He gives me a small smile that makes him look younger. . . .

You ever look at someone that you’ve known

your whole life and it’s almost like their face reconfigures itself right in front of your eyes?

Father Sean’s smile makes him look different and I can imagine the young man he once was.

“Especially me. My whole life I wanted to be a boxer, an athlete. I thought my body was my way out of the terrible circumstances I lived in—instead it was the body of Christ that got me out,

but sometimes I miss my island. My family.

My mother died and I didn’t get there in time to say good-bye.

We all doubt ourselves and our path sometimes.”

I want to say I’m sorry, to bring back the young Father Sean smile but instead I merely nod.

Some things don’t need words.





What Twin Knows


“Twin, you know Father Sean’s mom died?”

Twin looks up distracted from his phone, where his fingers have been rapidly texting.

I try to read over his shoulder but he flips it screen-down on the desk.

“Yeah, she died three summers ago.

Why you bringing that up?”

And I don’t know how I didn’t know.

How I didn’t notice Father Sean gone, or notice the person who took over his sermons.

Have I been checked out of church for that long?

I don’t ask Twin any of these questions.

He’s already back on his phone.

“Who you been texting so much lately?”

The question shoulders past my lips and I stop with one of my headphones halfway into my ear.