Baby Steps (an Ars Poetica)
This is the first line, where I compare fucking you
to being swallowed by a wave so blue it’s another planet,
and so big, like Hokusai big. But I say "making love"
instead because you’ve softened almost every edge
of my tongue. Still, I am ballsy in this poem. I follow
with a list of sexy images: the sun in the sky like a mango,
your hand like a butter knife over my bruises,
our pink mouths two schoolgirls running toward
anything pink, public bathrooms as private islands,
our breath like cartoon birds circling the hare
knocked out by the turtle. I extend this metaphor,
talk brilliantly about how our fate rides on this turtle’s
back, and that if we have faith, we will get somewhere
brilliant; the key: to go slow. Baby steps.
I change gears though, in the next stanza, contradict
everything I said about the turtle to tell you
that my favorite place in the world now is your backseat.
I use lines like "not fast enough" and "bedtime is a lifetime
without you". Heavy alliteration follows, nonsensically:
not knowing nothing newer, memory making mincemeat
of me, feeling all the freaking feels. Then comes the line
where I don’t tell you how scared I am. Then the line
about how scared you are. "Wild Horses" plays,
wild horses gallop across the page, a small fire burns
in your father’s village. I talk about silence, and how
I’m only fearless under you, how we are kindling
to kerosene. In this end line, neither of us are sorry.
Come back before the moon is full
open
boneless
and full-bodied
like the octopus
I dreamnt we waited for
while the sun set
octopus live fast
and die young
can we
use all three of our hearts
be as pragmatic
as blue-blooded
did you know the female
makes love
like we do
eager and always
with the threat
of cannibalism
before I scare you
with any more
cephalopod facts
come back to me
like the final tide
like the moon is full
of more light
than our bodies
could hold
When My Mother Tells Me I'll Always Be A Loser
my heart jumps out through my mouth
and hauls ass towards your heart,
pumping like a Newark boom box,
red as fuck, dark as menstrual blood,
warm as a fired canon. Your heart
will hug my heart hard as hell,
tell it Baby, it will be OK. It’ll be fine.
Remember that our mothers
inherited their cruelty, and I got
so so so SO much love to fill
that hole inside you she keeps stuffing
with sawdust. My heart will nod,
still blue but wiping away thick tears
my liver mistakes for rain. My heart
will tell your heart she’s always wanted
a white picket fence, but could never admit it.
Wild, Hungry
joy like the pit of a dusty peach
inside the dark deep when you drum
on the steering wheel in traffic,
when my leg crosses over yours
in a sleepy wave, when finches fly
from your mouth like psalms. I am
impossibly full but still ravenous
for every leftover from a storm
at the thought of your palm grazing
against my thigh like a two day old balloon
making its way across the yard to the child
ready for every rough press and rub.
Wild, hungry joy finds me finding
every way to laud a universe
that always provides but that you only praise
when my soft fists become
the treehouse your father never built.
Marina Carreira is a feminist Luso-American writer from Newark, NJ. She holds a MFA in Creative Writing from Rutgers University. Marina is curator and co-host of "Brick City Speaks," a monthly reading series held in the LIPS studio of the Gateway Project Spaces art gallery in Newark, NJ. Her work is featured or forthcoming in The Acentos Review, The Writing Disorder, Naugatuck River Review, Writers of the Portuguese Diaspora: An Anthology, The Fem, Paterson Literary Review, Rock and Sling, Bluestockings Magazine, Pittsburgh Poetry Review, and Pif Magazine, among others.