Pretty Hands (poem)

Jhon told me that I had pretty hands. Not in these words, because he doesn’t compliment girls from America with whom he has fallen in love at the inappropriate depth that is having only spent a couple weeks together, but that is also his appreciating my face in the context of how our facial features will be merged and divided on the plane that is our child’s, in this language. He also didn’t use these words because with his dangling hand, bent loosely at the wrist and bounding and falling with the effeminate dance of a man that either enjoys sex with other men, or simply has no use for the gender roles that often encourage sex with the opposite, he would never compliment a woman so plainly and he only spoke to me in color. I hadn’t decided if all South American men’s wrists moved with the same flamboyance that his “tu eres mi princesa” words carried, or if this was simply Jhon Fredy. Maybe this was the behavior of Colombian men with skin that is somehow miles deep with the browns of coffee beans but also impossibly red with the rush of indigenous blood. Either way, the coexistence of these colors in Jhon’s skin was visible –they lived together, and well –and I decided that we were the original people.