Stephanie Jones

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Barrier II

                        Baja California, Mexico 1999

No we can’t
speak to each other.
Speech between us
is an end
deader than language
lost to the gilding
of centuries.
From mother tongues
untimely ripped. 

No not in that
way. Not in the way we’ve
known &
inhabited through
these fragile generations.
We have
looks for exchanging
so we exchange
them

in the moments
when a black-hair bride’s drunk
father wipes his own
tear & our hearts
become eyes
of twin hurricanes & our hands
reach for a word’s
shelter.
The sturdy structure
of passing phrases. Seconds when
we can be reciprocal.

More mutual than distant
cousins musing
on a crowded dance floor
at the top
of a borrowed country
over our own mimicry. Over
something

nearly expressed.
We lace together
our fingers to form new
pairs of hands because
love without the right words
they’ll tell us & tell us
is still love.

*   Language borrowed from Macbeth Act V Scene viii

Stephanie Jones is the daughter of a Mexican immigrant and a Mediterranean Jersey girl, with bylines in The New York Times, HuffPost & elsewhere. She is a 2026 Rhysling nominee & her poems appear/are forthcoming in The Santa Fe Literary Review, New Feathers Anthology, Midway Journal, Querencia Press, The Inflectionist Review, Entre: Magazine of the Arts, Nulla, Pine Hills Review, Reverie Magazine & elsewhere, and as a commission for Blue Note Records.