Mariposa
Karen teaches the art of flying. She squeezes her accordion, fingering her cords until a husky hum fills this bar. Black keys drop and return like crows moving from cars and back to the middle of the street. It’s not to prove a point: she doesn't need to prove she can fly. No, Karen sits on the stool, gaze fixed neither in the past nor the future when her words rattle in the microphone; she shifts and, from the closest table I find, unfurls her wings. They’re not the black of her keys; they’re blue---azul claro. I see the sky begin to move like it did when I sat in my mother’s car on long trips. My eyes close to those clouds dispersing with each breathy line. In the dusk of any bar, I am alone with her longing and disappointment. Words do not have meaning for her: they are energy flowing into spell, conjuring ghosts only to exorcise them from our bodies. Karen is the music of the approaching sirens and the pain of an unclean break, lifted by hands that pried open the car door from the wreck only to save her again and again. To love a musician, to love the plump veins of her hands after every performance, I am saved again and again, until my own words unravel and I am left with this butterfly flitting from nodding head-to-nodding head, mariposa.
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