Engagement

I see them
in the eternal
shininess called youth.
                    Always
they are walking
on a wide sidewalk
in a sunlit cluster of white
houses, generous porches.
                    Forever
hopeful in a way
only possible
at another age.

                    That
slender girl in white
seersucker is me.
                     See,
she is still smiling
while he strolls
onto fashion plates
she didn’t know
                     meant
gay, homosexual, queer.

                      Does
she want to marry this
exquisite man with photogenic
jaw and emerald eyes?  It’s
easy to say Yes.  Yes
to everything he says
he wants, although he
never probes for what
all the other boys
                      want.

They are both lying, both
passionately lying.  Him,
about his lust and his love.
Their complicated unwinding
and the screwing up
again and again.

                      Why
is she lying?  Can’t she consider
who he might be?  She knows
each party is a hard black bead
swallowed in white bread.

Oh, they’re waving goodbye--
eager for the future, not
caring if it’s together
or apart.          

                      Yet
each pauses, searches
the other’s bright eyes
for the deliberate I do.







Sarah Cortez, member of the Texas Institute of Letters, is the author of an acclaimed poetry collection, How to Undress a Cop, and winner of the PEN Texas literary award in poetry. She has edited numerous volumes, including You Don’t Have a Clue: Latino Mystery Stories for Teens.  Her spiritual memoir, Walking Home: Growing Up Hispanic in Houston was published by Texas Review Press; a forthcoming poetry collection, Cold Blue Steel, will appear in 2013. Her poems, essays and short fiction are widely published and anthologized by international publishers.  Her most recently published anthology, Our Lost Border: Essays on Life amid the Narco-Violence is hailed by Publisher’s Weekly as “eye-opening.”