By josé rivers alfaro
Impossible Mirrors
and I could have loved you walking
above lamps glinting below
your feet
raced beside you
in the rain and not burned alone
in my bed, ash
on a wordless night
and I could have
remembered my tía marta, looked
for you my shattered
blood. I know
it’s impossible to put something broken
next to something that can run
through me and
keep me
whole
and I could have held
your laughter selfishly,
like a child’s deathgrip over a candybag
and let it fracture me
and time
and our sweetness
and I could have told you,
tienes razón tía, there’s nothing
wrong with thick mist between two
men waiting to cross
the dark
and
tía’s laundry between her hands and a telenovela folded into each crease and the first kiss I saw between two men on the tv behind her and me saying “ew” and she knowing the “ew” was someone else’s and you and you and you gifting me a scold and a prayer and a blessing all at once
y qué? dos hombres se pueden besar y amar
y
me quieres como soy
and I could have
told you
you fed me back
my blood, opened
my heart
made it beat
with your impossible mirrors
The Sea of Friendships
We say the magic words: time stops when we’re dancing. And I remember my first timba dance club, where I learned to dance freely. How when the fog sat over the Mission District in San Francisco Little Baobab’s sounds floated above it, music and laughter humming before you opened the door to friendship and learned more about life there than in college classrooms. How dancing with my friends could feel ancestrally quiet, like huddling for warmth around a strobe light fire telling ghost stories of our ex lovers and our ex selves between timba’s guapeas and glued kizomba steps and mambo thrumming feet and buoyed bachata connection. How we could modify the time between us in the car bar, telling jokes with our one shared raunchy brain cell afraid to go back inside to dance because then the laughter would stop our beat, because sometimes laughter feels as good as dancing. Only where my body moves next to yours, only where my sweat lives in your hands, do I feel damn thankful that in cosmic disorder we exist together building a new future tonight–
before we dance our first dance my friend Kait brings in her rain-soaked voice to the dance floor and says, I’m not feeling too good. Heartbroken steps lodged in concrete rubble split the world in half.
how can I hold you right now?
we return
and proceed to dance the music inherited from the enslaved and feel what we felt the last time we heard Joe Arroyo’s La Rebelión at the queer afro-latin dance festival pool party so much joy, so much joy, I tried to squeeze all of it—the sea of us—and absorb it all and also tell the story, do y’all know what this song is about? and then we remembered how we have always danced alongside collective joy and pain because what happens to you happens to me because we ache for each other. I cannot afford to look away from my partner because dancing and belonging are chosen family.
My friends and I like to say: dance saved us.
If time is all perception, maybe it isn’t that time stops when we dance, maybe it’s just that we surrender to it when we close the space between us.
josé rivers alfaro is the author of Something More Splendid Than Two published by punctumbooks press (2022). He is an artist who teaches writing and literature. Raised in Sacramento, California, he attended Cosumnes River College, the community college where he currently works as a professor. He earned his B.A. in English Literature at San Francisco State University. Following he earned his Ph.D. in English at University of California, Riverside, focusing on 19th-century American Literature, Queer Latinx Studies, and Dance/Performance Studies. Before returning to Sacramento, he learned how to dance salsa and bachata. Since then, he continues to spend a lot of time thinking about how he can make the magic of the dance floor happen on the page.