You can’t carry me on your back to touch the sun
because I don’t have your eyes.
Mom has brown eyes, you have brown eyes, the whole family has brown eyes
like earth that absorbs water too easily.

I have absinthe eyes
absent
grass from Eden.

Deeply absent
from you, father,
from the hand that could have drawn a circle with chalk
a circle I would never leave, and I’d build a fortress there,
you’d be my first love, and I’d cry for you
when my second passion grows unrequited, and I won’t know where to go
when life pushes me to the penultimate station, and I could call you to pick me up.

I have the greenest eyes,
and mom salts the soup with tears.
Because she’s the beauty, you the beast
because she’s the Romanian sunflower field, and you the hailstorm,
paranoid in the colors of the northern lights.

I imagine what you think when you look like that,
when the doll has my eyes too,
you turn your head the way death closes its eyes out of pity
before an old woman who only wants to see God in the orthodox icon.

And my thought remained a rancid tear,
because I don’t have eyes in the color
of a cheap chocolate from an obsolete fair.