Do you remember when
you christened me?
You, with your dead Jesus
who wouldn’t let you live
Your knife blades
carved out my flesh
into a first-blooming flower
The petals
pink as salmon swimming upstream
to their delicious execution
You said you had been drug in
As for me, I was escorted
A tuxedoed chauffeur driving me
into a car accident
Awestruck by the joyride
I sucked in the scenery
the red sky licking my wounds
before they broke open at the scene
Do you remember how wet
was my baptism?
It drowned me
Your exquisite hands
pulled me below
and jerked my head back up by my hair
As I coughed and sputtered
you held me like a soul mate
and answered with a kiss
like communion on my tongue
In the morning
we held each berry
before sinking our teeth in
With stained lips
we savored them
knowing their whole lives
were about our purple mouths
We laughed
until all our teeth fell out
our tongues lost
without their white walls
fanged inner-city billboards
with graffiti-sprayed cries
of lost immigrants
in a foreign land that promised
milk and honey
Sugary opiates
that sweetly sucked
the bone marrow out
Do you remember how you opened me?
spreading me wide
like a mango ripped open
its nectar crying out over its skin
or like steel clamps pulling my chest apart
for open-heart surgery
Do you remember how you anointed me?
your lips
and my lips
and all that spilled out of them
the words and songs and saliva
painted a story all over our bodies
it had a plot but no context
it was a first novel
an immature infant
suckling the milk out
of breasts heavy
with the weight of woman
Woman with the foreign tongue
singing a lullaby
to a death squad
You would save me with my own sins
like Sunday lovers hiding in a confessional
hailing to what we knew was most divine
answered by just another crucifixion
Your long languid fingers
sliding through the holes in my hands
Do you remember how exalted
was our resurrection
after I gave birth to your death?
Like red plastic roses on a tombstone
you decorated my despair
Your trembling hands pulled
back the sheets of my sickbed
you reached through the middle part
and laid me back
burying your black head
in my between
and delivered me
Do you remember my unction?
With the laying on of your hands
you typed out our sentences
I swallowed your seeds
choking back the vomit
that their roots refused to release
Like a terminal patient
I gave myself to your cancer
I closed my eyes
as the winter snow quietly fell
and listened
for the oncoming deafening silence
At last you cleared your throat
and slowly fingered your new pages
Your lips finally parted
and as my heartbeat slowed
you read
me
my last rites
