Put Down Your Camera and Love Me

The dead whale’s bones wash to white

on the beachhead in Puerto Peñasco.

We are full of chalupas, salsa verde,

and bad Mexican music. Your mouth

tastes of sea salt, the margaritas

we drank at the fish market bar.

I take a swallow, taste lime,

drink you in.

The skeletal shadow sinks eastward.

Twinned porpoise streak silver over the sea.

Sunset fingers through the carcass

to touch a tourist who stops to snap

a photo of his future.

©JP Reese 2011
First published March, 2011 in Ramshackle Review
http://ramshacklereview.blogspot.com/2011/03/put-down-your-camera-and-love-me-by-j.html

Another, slightly revised version was published at Reprint Poetry, February, 2012: http://reprintpoetry.com/2012/02/16/jp-reese/