Nights Like This

There is no discovery without risk and what you risk reveals what you value.

—Jeanette Winterson

At Lawaan, this oldest cinema house—
frequented for old bold movies and illicit
trades inside— he walks up to her,
slyly presses her shirt tail, says,

“I guess you’ve met your Buena Mano.”

By the transient stroke of yellow light, she catches
his face. Disfavor tightens her lips. But—
subservience is her living, a clingstone
to this city’s hurried trade.

With night’s brightness on them they stride,
skirting Claveria's sidewalks. Passers-by
sneak sidelong glances at her, tonight's staple
suspicion. He owns her, his hand

over her shoulder. In a tight casket,
a room of a nearest rental, they slip in
like needles, kept carefully yet
poorly-paired—

one feels the other by skin’s stiffness.
This is her third time
to warrant the bidding of a stranger. He says
he is a shopkeeper at day,

a laundry shop worker at night,
the furrows on his palm tells: he is twice
her age. Nineteen, she is
too thin, her fingernails on his fat back

cannot even object, her eyes
these frail orbs swelling
in memory of an old mother
left in a far-off town.

As he moves down,
his sickly dog’s smell swarms
around the room, eluding
through the holes

of walls, she— at tearing's point now—
squirms, the moment when clothes
are pushed into disgraceful curls.
He heaves. She sighs. Bodies

yawn apart, reveals the sheath leaking
as he languidly draws out.
He goes off and the only word he leaves,
soon closing her nights, is—

conception. Tonight, the city's alive.
In scaffolding of lights of the streets
she trails the roads leading to the rental.
In that room she hides and pulls

the fetus out. Seeing rivulets of red,
she breathes out,“dead.” On her way
out, through mazes of corridors
she remembers the night.

Nevermore will it scare her.
Till an echo, sharp as the fluster
of doors, reaches her: someone else is yet
cursing to the gods. 

-Arian Rey Tejano © 2012 A Noiseless Patient Spider. All rights reserved