Lucas Cardona

I wish I could go back and meet my parents 
the year they met. Back in the 80’s when 
it was still ok to show up to homeroom 
wearing black leather pants and hair 
as wild and bright as a bougainvillea 
spilling over the side of a picket fence. 
I want to walk my mother home along 
Fourth Ave with my father beneath a full moon. 
I want to taste the humidity and listen 
to cicadas thrumming, see the tremor 
of the streetlight they kiss under. I want 
the three of us to get drunk around a fire 
and blast Raised on Radio from a big-ass 
boombox so that I can study their expressions 
through the flames as if they’d been preserved 
like petroglyphs for ten thousand years. 
I want to be a witness to their love 
when it was still a candle dropped at random 
down the bottled throat of space. Watch as 
they gather like acolytes around the small 
flickering miracle, hugging the warmth, 
praying it stayed lit.