Why I Needed To

because I faithfully reply to every email from the absurd
gods of urgency who punish my good deeds by leaving me
empty when I empty my inbox … because I praise hating

myself, broken into my calendar’s time-slotted tasks, slicing
me thin with the thick duty of being everything yet nothing
to anyone, not even to me … because I remember birthdays

but forget my own and my mother’s … because she is bitter
sweet as the Cuban coffee she brews after Sunday dinners …
because she loves me only in the language of her cooking

my favorite dish: shrimp enchilados … because of my bland
father sunk in his armchair without me on his lap … because
he never told me the life story I read only in the half

moons of his eyes the morning he gazed into mine, then
died … because my brother and I need to drink to share
our shared hurt at happy hour, so unhappily grateful for

love’s wreckage … because my husband, who’s still scared
of his adoration for me as we embrace sleep, still doubts
how long I’ll nest my dreams in his arms … because I have

never quite told him: always … because I’m just as afraid of
needing him more than myself … because I’m not the one
I’ve curated on Instagram: oh so humbled by, so grateful for,

so many posted blessings with my posed selves … because
tonight I again remember I’m nothing more than a mirage
slowly disappearing on my porch, sitting with half the life

I have left, still trying to piece how I fit into the puzzle of
the constellations … because I’ve drunk their shots of light
and too many martinis … because I’m cheering mindlessly

to the moon, to my wish for immortality amid the clouds
of my own cigarette smoke … because I should finally quit
doubting my life will be more than these anonymous bones

… because I need to believe in something else, truer than
me … that’s why today I had to take myself away
to the beach … because I needed to imagine my father as

that father at the shore, handing a bouquet of seashells to
his son … because I needed to taste that love can be simple
as a mother remembering to pack sodas and sandwiches …

because I needed the seagulls tending the horizon to teach
me again to be as still as them, to peer calmly into the void
of the skies I face … because I needed to hear the waves

break and break me into the lines of this poem … because
I needed to burn, to see myself shine just as beautifully
as the rosy glow of the sunlight bathing my closed eyes.