Keep Sweet

baby girl, you’re full of shit. you just met him, but
the elder who sells crystals from a cart on the corner
remembers when you were still young enough
to cut your teeth on the taut edge of being alive.

the elder selling crystals from a cart on the corner
spoils you, palms you stones on your way home.
cut your teeth on the taut edge of being alive, he prods.
clearest quartz, lapis lazuli. citrine, tourmaline,

he spoils you—your palms cradling the stones home.
you ask him about love. the elder says, what of it.
clearest quartz, lapis lazuli. citrine, tourmaline,
they won’t do. you ask about garnet, carnelian—

you ask about love. what of love does the elder
smile about? he scoffs at you. baby girl, keep sweet.
that won’t do. you hunt for garnet, carnelian—
cheat, buy a string of pink beads from a witch shop.

keep sweet. he will smile & he will scoff. but
nothing happens. instead, the elder hands you
a string of pink beads he cheated from a crone.
sitting back on his creaking stool, always ready

for nothing to happen. a man who likes to drink
his honey afternoons slow, blushing into dusk.
he sits back on his stool, creaks it back & forth.
you just met him. baby girl, you’re full of shit.

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Ina Cariño is a 2022 Whiting Award winner for poetry. Their work appears in The American Poetry Review, The Margins, Guernica, Poetry Northwest, Poetry Magazine, The Paris Review Daily, Waxwing, New England Review, and elsewhere. She is a Kundiman fellow and is the winner of the 2021 Alice James Award for Feast, published by Alice James Books in March 2023. In 2021, Ina was selected as one of four winners of the 92Y Discovery Poetry Contest.