A Heart Can Be Broken Only Once, Like A Window

 I miss the kind of love they sing about in oldiez songs

but I don't ask for it anymore.  My palms are turned down

against gusts taking themselves away.  I listen to wild parrots

while I run between sycamores in the park.  I walk around

uncomfortable in the jeans and wonder if the holes

are something I've made.  I think about some things

so I don't think about other things: pizza, poetry, Neosporin.  

I eat my fried eggs out of a bowl shaped like a man's hands.  

The thin, gold rings on his fingers are still mine.  I have myself 

to remind me of love, and that's all.  I tie tiny triangles of glass

to string that I wear around my neck, and some say it's pretty.

When my mother doesn't recognize the jewelry adorning me,

hoping, she asks if it's new.  And even though I am Mexican,

feel deeply & joke dark, God still owes me a drink for every time

the woman I should be has died.  I no longer mean it when 

I say please.  Sometimes words belong between certain people

And neither one is you.  Sometimes people are just lines in a song.

Today, I feel like telling jokes instead of pretending

to write pretty music and I am angry with the word should.

I think about words so I don't think about loss, or all the feathers

left on my porch.  I want to open the front door and see

a clean bird waiting for me on the doormat like I'm Snow White

even if it has rusted forks for wings.  I once heard

that the world breaks everyone.  That afterwards,

many are stronger at the broken places.  I wish

a whole woman would wake up inside of me.