Mamãe (excerpt from the beginning)

Tia Nastásia’s hair would go sshhh. It was pale gray and thin and it told me to stay quiet. It moved, though discretely and you only really noticed it when she wasn’t doing very much. I can imagine her leaning her back against the sink after cleaning the dishes, her body still and her gray hairs breathing like grass.

I had told tia Nastásia one day that the colors were changing and I missed the old ones. She told me that there was no such thing as old. But she was old. And I remember that on that day the blood under her eyes matched the pink of her scarf.

It was getting cold. At night I stuck my head under the sheets so that my breath would keep me warm. I missed Brazil and I didn’t like the new colors. I told tia Nastásia that this winter would poison me. I would turn into glass and soon I would be smooth and cold and if you touched me you’d bleed. Tia Nastásia replied by telling me that she had weighed another baby that day. My tia was a pediatrician. She weighed babies on metal scales like chicken breasts. The baby had cried until it no longer had any eyes. They had stuck inside its flushed face like buds that couldn’t flower. The scale was cold and the baby was naked.

That day while tia Nastásia cooked lunch, I lied on her couch and closed my eyes. I didn’t fall sleep and because of it I could tell when my eyes were getting closer to myself and then slowly farther. Most of the time they were farther because I was thinking too much.

“How was school today?” My tia had asked. I opened my eyes to the inordinate convex swell of her back as she sliced bananas at the kitchen counter. I told her that this boy Brett had left a few bras sticking out of his locker as a joke. She found it funny. Tia Nastásia had a sense of humor and I trusted her as a person because of it. She then asked me if I had been keeping in touch with my friends in Brasilia. I told her that I had. But I had been writing letters to people without sending them. They were kept in a journal and really they were letters to myself.

Tia Nastásia had made rice and beans, spinach, meat and farofa. She placed the cut bananas in a small clay bowl because she knew that I liked to mix bananas in with my rice and beans. Ever since I had moved, I got into the habit of putting bananas in my cereal. I had been eating cereal every morning, like the Americans did. I was addicted to the tasty American milk and I liked how sugary it got from the cereal flakes.

Dilated Eyes

We stare at each other
With dilated eyes
Through distorted fishbowl lenses.

You glow in the yoke of your skin,
You feel at ease and that slow
Ochre makes you laugh
Smiles that harden your cheeks and shrivel
Your hair into nests.

I wish you would close your eyes,
You're opening them and too much
Bleeds at their centers.

They grab at the trunk of my stomach.
I miss eyes,
Webs of cauliflower.

I don't want to reach for you.
I do,

You are,
Wet, oily, not there. My eyes are closed.

Staring at each other, with dilated eyes.

Together

We knead the ground we tread
With interlocking, sullied fingers.
Always searching, finding
Sculptures in the earth, in people.

We smell of the present,
Moving and burning.

Together we imagine
To hold a bursting pit.
Together we fade,
For now we tenderly glow.

Losing Earth

We slit, thin and squeeze
Earth's juices
As if to crush a sprouting flower,
In order to make the Earth our World.

Wait.

Look hard.
Crack the black that appears
To cake the sky and dry over our eyes.

We're dripping
Into other worlds.
Clouds like phantoms, rocks,
Moths and webs,
Wet with
Blue, pink soda, orange.

Perhaps the universe is only to be seen,
Not touched.

We could unzip the soil under and in us,
Beneath this sliver of sky.

To move like the moon as it curves into itself.

And inhale colors
As they take gulps of other colors.

The earth can loosen,
Shake laughing,

If only we'd make the world our Earth.

crawling into september

we all need somebody to lean on

Lean On Me - Al Green

Some times in our lives, we all have pain, we all have sorrow.
But, if we are wise, we know that there's always tomorrow.

Lean on me, when your not strong, and I'll be your friend,
I'll help you carry on. For, it won't be long, 'till I'm gonna need
somebody to lean on.

Please, swallow your pride, if I have
faith, you need to borrow. For no one can fill those of your
needs, that you won't let show.

You just call on me, brother when you need a hand,
We all need somebody to lean on.
I just might have a problem that you'll understand,
we all need somebody to lean on.

moonrise by sylvia plath

full moon on oak st. beach, chicago

Moonrise

Grub-white mulberries redden among leaves.
I'll go out and sit in white like they do,
Doing nothing. July's juice rounds their nubs.

This park is fleshed with idiot petals.
White catalpa flowers tower, topple,
Cast a round white shadow in their dying.

A pigeon rudders down. It's fantail's white
Vocation enough: opening, shutting
White petals, white fantails, ten white fingers.

Enough for fingernails to make half-moons
Redden in white palms no labor reddens.
White bruises toward color, else collapses.

Berries redden. A body of whiteness
Rots, and smells of rot under its headstone
Though the body walk out in clean linen.

I smell that whiteness here, beneath the stones
Where small ants roll their eggs, where grubs fatten.
Death may whiten in sun or out of it.

Death whitens in the egg and out of it.
I can see no color for this whiteness.
White: it is a complexion of the mind.

I tire, imagining white Niagaras
Build up from a rock root, as fountains build
Against the weighty image of their fall.

Lucina, bony mother, laboring
Among the socketed white stars, your face
Of candor pares white flesh to the white bone,

Who drag our ancient father at the heel,
White-bearded, weary. The berries purple
And bleed. The white stomach may ripen yet.