Are You Lonely Tonight?

BY NOEL MUNGUIA-MORENO

It’s the golden hour, but I’ve prepped for blue, does yearn seep from pine bark or the space between my fingers, are the daffodils my Father brought my Mother enough to fill the empty vase she holds? A promise was enough when I love you seemed too simple, I stand in their unanswered question and sob into swaying wheat for something called resplendence, I burn scratched letters and blow the embers to the electrical sky in hopes I do not find myself with an empty vase, did my Father know yellow bulbs are first to rot or did he, again, forget to ask, if I traveled to the river by which he would coil, could I find the perfect piece to mend unsmiling photos? When agave bleeds sweet poison and coats my lips, will desert flower eclipse the bloom of nothing to oasis, verdant and everlasting, will the vultures stop circling when the aura above your head beams honeysuckle? Will I ponder in the moment between hello and goodbye, or will I remember when we would roll in reeds and dew-kissed grass shimmering in our own idea of now? Mother has a name, and that is her first death. She becomes cement, factual, rather than myth or god, a name strips her of immortality, but Father does not notice. He will water weeds and move the sun under the horizon. In Mother’s many deaths, I mourn most the ring collecting dust on the vanity.