For Lysa, Who Tattoos Me In Her Miami Living Room

By Lissette Mendez

Across Washington Avenue, limousines
disgorge their starched and shimmery
occupants in plumes of laughter and hunger
into a landscape confettied with sex and paste jewels.
“I dreamt this, ” she tells me, straddling my right knee,

her needled machine poised near the hollow
between my shoulder and clavicle, and I smell
the incense and tobacco suffusing her T-shirt
but we’re not touching and behind us is Monday
night’s parade of moon and sea, palpable

in this room of six windows where a steel table
serves as altar: bottled pigments, paper towels,
Vaseline, surgical soap in its squirter.
Snap and pull of latex gloves within the blue
glow from the street lamps, tattoo of lacquered nails

against a cheap lighter, hiss of flame against
the mouth of the cigarette, clang of glass and metal
against the city’s midnight machinery
while practice stencils flutter to the floor.
“I dreamt this, you have perfect skin, ” she tells me again

as the thump of hip-hop blurs into the needle’s whine
and my eyes decant salt pearls that fall and fuse
with the ink and blood welling along the delicate strokes
of the kanji that will anchor me.

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