Someday I'll Love Raphael Arevalo
by Matthew Breit
after Vuong, Reeves, and O’Hara
Wailing in Bogota waiting
for some nuns we won't remember
to bring food and peek-a-boo, change
our diaper, sing, “Jesus loves you
this I know.” No one is coming.
It’s OK; I’m here—with a new name
and bits of bossa nova; Rama Revealed;
punk rock and third-wave ska; a cow bone mala;
Calvin and Hobbes; the heft of a large brass
cross; Death and The Magician; 108 prostrations;
blood, broken; permission; Ah—chanted low
in the chest; the equation for mass-energy
equivalence; adoption papers; moonlit redwood
groves; the Bodhicaryavatara; dakinis walking
on the sky like Christ walked on water.
I imagine the orphanage
medieval, made of damp stone;
voices echo down torchlit
corridors; there's a room where
babies lay in rows of cribs
tended by nuns humming
songs about the moon or boys
they loved before they gave their
lives away to God.
I know we cried until
we learned better. I know
someone laid beside us
like a perfumed shadow—
ice, rot, mint, car exhaust,
ozone, iron, peach lip gloss.
She held us in cold arms
full of quasars and fireflies
and whispered, “It’s OK.
Everything goes. Love is
holding the absence
of briefly radiant things.”