To the love in my life, mi cultura querida:

You feel like Latin soul,

Baby let that music play,

Your trumpet sounding the songs of my soul,

Your drums beating to the rhythm in my body,

Guitar strings strumming at the strings in my heart.

Music from a place that understands the curve of my legs in relation to the circumference of my hips,

The curve of my eyebrows like the curve of my spine.

The ridge of la montaña en la mañana.

The skirt of my dress shrouding what's behind like mist on a mountain,

Baby, baile conmigo.

Twirl with me like dust in the sunshine.

You see my face like a mirage,

I see your eyes like a drink of water,

Smile like the cracked clay of the sierras,

When I'm with you my skin shines with the ancestral brown it was born to be.

Strip my body of the heavy heat that weighs me down and clothe me in the light blue of agua fresca and Spanish sky,

Our attitudes like prickly nopalitos,

But inside our spirits are as fresh as palletas on a hot summer's day.

You say I am like a cactus flower---pretty,

But when you taste the spices on the tip of my tongue it makes you trip like no other drug.

Shake your hips next mine,

Footsteps mirror images of the poetry our bodies make when they're together.

I love the way you sing to me in Spanish, 

You make me see rojos and amarillos in my vision,

and suddenly, I don't need no other man.

Baby, you spice up my life like salsa,

Latin soul playing in the background of my mind.

Our palms stay clasped like talons on serpentine scales,

Sweaty with summer contact,

But we are as light as the sand on a beach.

Slightly broken like  terra cotta tiles in a courtyard of mestizo memories,

But as hard and as strong as the bricks in Aztec temples,

We are as vast as the canyons that hold our history,

As bright as the sun that we worship.

Sacrifice me in a fit of passion to the culture in my blood.