In the spirit of amor, today I bring you the romantic prose of our own Alberto Rios, who was born on the Arizona side of Nogales, and is a former Guggenheim Fellow and a Regent’s Professor at ASU. The National Book Awards judges called him “a poet of reverie and magical perception.”

His poem “Teodoro Luna’s Two Kisses” is one I keep close to my heart, a psalm to the kind of love we all hope to find and keep. Also, it reminds me of my grandparents.

Mr. Teodoro Luna in his later years had taken to kissing
His wife
Not so much with his lips as with his brows.
This is not to say he put his forehead
Against her mouth--
Rather, he would lift his eyebrows, once, quickly:
Not so vigorously he might be confused with the villain
Famous in the theaters, but not so little as to be thought
A slight movement, one of accident. This way
He kissed her
Often and quietly, across tables and through doorways,
Sometimes in photographs, and so through the years themselves.
This was his passion, that only she might see. The chance
He might feel some movement on her lips
Toward laughter.

My grandparents on their wedding day, 1944.

Buy Rios' book here.