Kevin J.B. O’Connor

Enero

The art historian was dissatisfied,

having consumed three tacos with onion and cilantro

and forgetting her mother’s birthday

while in Mexico City with me, her boyfriend.

This a mere week after I’d nearly drowned

in the waters off the coast of Puerto Escondido,

my Spanish lackluster enough to prevent me from reading

“peligro” on a tipsy-turvy sign.

Our relationship was new,

although we’d booked the “marital suite” at the local hotel.

We were teenagers, still interested

in soap operas and striving for straight A’s.

In town, we drank Oaxacan coffee and smoked Cuban cigars.

Years later, I wonder what locals thought of us,

and the likely noise they heard coming from our room,

blasting rock and drinking cheap beer.

Flying home, I gazed out the plane window at the crater

of the city, pocked with green shrubbery,

rimmed with mountains. At the airport in Baltimore,

I stuffed cigars in my pockets,

only to be met at customs by barking dogs.

But I escaped unscathed to face another day of drudgery

at the university, serving coffee to overpaid professors

and students. And what I recall most of that trip—

an afternoon at the house of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera—

fades into obscurity like winter rain pelting us

as we exited into the Maryland night, my sister picking us up

and driving us back to my tiny Baltimore apartment.