Javier Zamora - Exiliados

for Monika Sok

 

We didn’t hold typhoons or tropics in our hands.

I didn’t reach across the table on our first date

at Cornelia Street Café. In my humid pockets,

 

my fists were old tennis balls thrown to the stray dog

of love bouncing toward the Hudson down

to South Ferry. We didn’t hold hands in that cold

 

October wind, but the waves witnessed our promise

to return to my cratered-deforested homeland,

and you to your parents’, sometime in the future.

 

No citizenship or some other violence...