The name comes from the Spanish taken from the Aztec, ahuacatl, meaning testicle, from the shape; a symbol of fertility to them. A woman next to me takes two in one hand, jostling them as if they were Chinese meditation balls, the chimes soothing the air. She says, I never tire of avocados; if I could, I would eat them every day. Hass are fine, she says, but have you ever had a Hawaiian Sharwil? I shake my head. An avocado milkshake, she asks? No, I say. Me neither, she says, but I hope to one day. I nod knowingly, and it’s as if we’ve shared a secret, but she smiles and moves on. Those balls I am thinking of are usually Cloisonné, an Asian art form dating to over 500 years ago. The original color was a blue, so light it evoked a still pond surface reflecting a spring sky. Most avocados are green, dark and mottled, nearly rotted looking when ripe. Cloisonné comes from the French, cloison, or partition, from the Latin, cludere, to close. Blowjob is just another word for fellatio from the Latin for to suck milk from. I recall my first one, not an avocado, but a blow job, how the boy made me, how I wasn’t ashamed because it was what I’d thought about in the partition between day and night before falling asleep for years. I was startled at how good secrets can be if handled right, by the various names we give them, how they ripen with time.

This poem wants to be a world citizen sidling up to L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E whispering questions about the narrative, or skirting story carrying cardboard signs with nothing but circles on it. Three equals Peace Through Culture, circles not con-joined but freestanding, locus of control central to self, to peace, to culture. This poem wants to be a circle, a house in a painting with a double yellow line leading to it, but stopping before the door, a harbinger of resistance, ugly enough to be beautiful, but not defined by it. It wants to D-E-M-O-N-S-T-R-A-T-E, dance on its own legs without worrying it might be taken down by a rubber bullet. A poem in this city is a poem in a city on whose streets I could sleep. It’s warm there; the poems are free-range; they come from all over the world, and at night, congregate in the park, certain no one will draw their blinds or lock the doors to their houses.

Every kiss is a first kiss when you’ve been loved so hard you feel your own worth. I wish I could kiss that into every man I see: the pizza delivery guy, 58 and fading, the young cynic frothing my coffee, the grease-monkey lubing my car with a curled Balthasar in his back pocket, my sons, all of them, everyday, my husband, everyman, everyone, even every woman, I should kiss, too: the dreary, the sadly refused and refusing ones, the woman losing her hair after losing her breasts, even my husband’s 90 year old grandmother, those crevasses in her face from smoking, but so deep, so full of lost time and the sweetness of every kiss she ever gave or held back. If I cupped her face in my two hands and breathed on her, what dust would fill my nose, redolent, my eyes, illumined, every kiss from then on a new descent. How else should you kiss but as if into a cave, a lost limb, lost light, no footing, just awe, and the terrible, terrible surrender? And how else to receive one, but like a baby or an old woman, all mouth, all need, and now, right now.