Because-

you could have been in 1927 India, an English aristocrat seeking
gold more than mythologies and its many-armed gods,
and my family had long left for a shore with tainted sand, a warm place
and yet they brought their valises and coats to remind their bodies
of a place they used to know as home. My family, leaving: hopeful and happy
in their hopefulness. Taking away
all chances of us meeting before they even found a name
to suit what I would become. The year could have been 1802:
I would have been a boy from Panama, wont to walking barefoot and unused
to the sound of the words spoken in your then-Chinese tongue, cursed
with a dynasty of characters made to replace
the feeling of being unable to contain what we mean to say.
Or we could have been a few decades ago: 1989, meeting
in a dusty crossroad, exchanging vows without care,
before heading to our mothers’ wombs, allowing ourselves to be born
and so easily, so quickly forgetting each other.
Or I could have been a princess of an age lost
to this one, sent to die
because my country could not withstand bullets with wooden spears
and you, a magician on the other side of the world, speaking in tongues
I would never taste. But we are here and now and does the year mean anything?

All I think of is how much you remind me of my father; this is why I am wary and slow
to let your hand brush mine, folding my arms- knowing
for the first time that we spoke before we were even given
names, before we knew the names
of these years we are made to live in, knowing that your smile
carried countless years’ worth of faces that were ours.