Cape Verdean Blues
Page 2
wandering, without a chance
for renewal.
DENIZ
This part of life should get to be longer. We crashed off a bridge in my sleep that summer you bit into an orange in order to peel it and felt embarrassed when our friends laughed out of slight disgust. You should come with a disclaimer. We learned trades with our hands but there on that bridge we were cultured on the existence of our teeth. Mine grit yours broke. Am I talking about the sun? The sun is on the list of things I make myself I tell myself. I am nothing without. Still, no. I think this is about waves. I think it started with a dream. I should come with a disclaimer. Anything you say or do may be used against you in a poem. Nature itself designed the first bridges. You’re forgetting what sorrow sounds like in the dark. How to season fish. Taste the salt away on fingers. Reward yourself. Get down on your knees and eat. Forgive yourself. Another trick to being alone. I was in the air, still. Resembling how we made our first bound into a hospital room with an open window. I think it started with my mother crying while she spoke. I heard the ocean in her mouth. I think it ended with a sales associate named Deniz, meaning “sea” in Turkish.
I’M NOT DRUNK; I HAVE ONLY SWALLOWED A BONE!
In his tongue, I disappear with all the basics
to say, No, I will not marry you for documents.
Nights have never been good to me. The hour
of think this, do that. Manuel’s hair curls like a ribbon
sprayed with cornstarch. He speaks to me
in Kriolu, his curls bounce with animation.
My mouth responds with leg locking
under a beach tent. My voice is trying to hide
in my throat; I can tell. My jaw is breaking.
About Tarrafal, the sweet stray dog
countryside where we lie, Manuel tells me how the sky
swells up like a bruise out of nowhere, like a grape
next to the sun. Language lost on every lick
placed on my back.
From Graciosa, Tarrafal’s palm trees are
deceptively American. Detachment swells up
out of nowhere, like a bruise surprising for its size
after scratching. Tarrafal, the sea urchin
that won’t sting. I need more metaphors
for hard things to swallow.
For fun, I let the bones of the eel get to know my mouth,
an inert place from which I only speak my native
language when fear trumps freedom. When he’s driving
stick shift too fast on cobbled roads when on cobbled
roads he rears too close to stray dogs.
I work up a loose gut to say I’m not drunk;
I have only swallowed a bone!
Wet from Cape Verde’s unremarkable humid winds,
I chip like a cheap topcoat. Permitting him a taste
of the English until I come off his tongue,
needing a name for every move it took to bring forth
the nebulous identity of rice and beans.
STROLOGY SCORPIO
Learn waiting by waiting in daylight. Life used to be hair soaking feathered pillowcases on the first night. Trails of casual October sin dripping down your neck. Nights were your eyes open sinking in another fool’s mouth. Scorpio, try pedaling forwards this month. Put on a song that reminds you of nothing as you wash your hair with three conditioned conditioners. Untangle indecision. Practice bantu knots and Scorpio, you’ve got to let them dry. Or else you can count on the texture of your hair feeling like Mercury in Retrograde. This month, life’ll be a night disguised as moisturized lips, wet with pillow talk. Every time you reach for something, it’ll be paper towel. Prayer won’t work. If you learn waiting by waiting for the collapse of the moon, on the 18th, over brunch, water will not drip down the back of your neck. This is your time to turn yourself into one of those women who wait, forever and a day, til the bantu knots dry.
WHEN I SAY I WANT A BABY, YOU SAY YOU MISS ME THAT MUCH TOO
Let this letter find
you well as I found your well,
sullied and full, ill-timed
ocean water
on my tongue.
Summer
still feels like your head locked
in my lap. Your bareness
stepped out for a river run.
The day you discovered the sun
is a noun you can’t touch,
I licked the mole on your cheek
excited to make amends
with a verb I can’t love.
I watched you in winter
unfold like a travelling tragedy;
drunk, womb, memory,
sunk, uncertainty.
A body’s not just a body.
What is surveillance if not
a world where you are the man?
You survey yet you don’t learn.
I howl your name, a woman
raised by wolves, inept were we.
A soft fog dims
all lights and chokes me. Please.
THIS WON’T MAKE SENSE IN ENGLISH
gudjadu adj. sprouted; bud; el éra nóba inda, ku se mama ~, she was still a virgin with her breasts sprouting
Living single tongue not sweet enough yet still mourning Queen Latifah with the key around her neck
SELF-PROCLAIMED SAD BOY
Everyone I want to write to is dead.
So I meet sad boy on the busy Internet streets,
traffic covered in drunk people. Perhaps I can explain
how they always come back to the house,
like loose lies and friendly fires
making vintage every Gchat.
He was New York new.
Crept up on me right before the beat dropped,
immediately after I realized
I conveniently live in a great place
for a mental breakdown.
We meet in Boston where I hide my face
behind silent smoked sheets we fold together.
I’m clenching the end.
Sad boy quit me seven times
after the smell of my whiskey damp tongue
made a tattoo on his back.
I want less from me and more for me.
So I write another tiny letter,
the matters of men who are not mine
do not matter to me.
I say sad boy being admired
must be lonely IRL. In three bridges time,
we drank our dinner, listened to Janet Jackson,
Do you want this? Can you handle this?
Do you want the war that comes
with this skin? Well, come here then.
RE THE DENTIST AND HIS NEW FAMILY
Teeth person will not eat beef unless the mother cooks it.
The I would like to say: Fuck your baby.
Mother will cook beef if son buys it.
A teeth person walks about the quad on what a person is
suspected to walk upon.
A person of teeth. Teeth own a person.
I am doing well. I am having a baby.
Some sets of teeth walk. Teeth person,
I have had dreams about your baby. Teeth on carefully.
I was once a baby, now, damaged goods, now, a dent in the
corner of a $1,500 laptop, precious technology.
Communicate a stain that would be refused by the local favorite
dry cleaner.
Teeth person taught me ruin.
Exit without having entered.
List what’s known about teeth person other than teeth person
will not eat beef unless mother cooks it.
Teeth person once walked upon, on, with tongue to say: I want
an artist.
The mirthful artist wonders,
Did teeth person ever declare: I want a bank teller?
Teeth, bank teller, baby.
Show the I those teeth. Show the I that money.
WELCOME BACK
after Eth
eridge Knight
Welcome back, Ms. B: Love of My Life—
How’s your identity problem?—your culture
problem? you / are / pickling
your lesson—
Gotta / watch / out
for the “Ol’ Lesson”: Love of My Life.
How’s your acid
problem?—your weed, Adderall, Lexapro
and Lithium too?—your lustful problem—
How’s your weight problem—your eating
problem? How’s your lying and cheating
and staying out all / night long?
Welcome back, Ms. B: Love of My Life.
How’s your money / saved up / don’t know
what to do with it problem? You quit—
Your job problem. How’s your small breast
problem?—your might buy some
titties problem? How’s your Plan B?
Welcome back, Ms. B: Love of My Life
How’s your used to / write / that boy
in jail / until he got shot & killed problem?
How’s your stalker problem?—
Your fucking too many in the crew?
You don’t feel magic / ain’t never loved no one
problem? How’s your book
problem? / Ain’t been published /
haven’t read your lover’s book problem?
How’s your might go to Dominican Republic
to fix your waist / what you sit on / put
your / breasts in her & his mouth problem?
The porn problem?
Never let go / don’t love / don’t leave
please need me problem? Your want to fuck
everywhere but a bed / in the dark / problem?
And your crushing pills / crushing dignity
out of pity problem?
How’s your drinking?—your thinking?
You still paranoid? Still bipolar?
Still scared shitless? Still wanna die?
Welcome back, Ms. B: Love of My Life.
How’s your language problem? Understand
and won’t speak to save your
grandmother’s heart problem?
How’s your / everything is about pussy
and race problem?—Your enough problem—
You gotta watch out for the “Ol’ Lesson.”
How’s your social network?
Your / why / did / he / just / post
a / photo / of / his / girlfriend / knowing
I / would / see / it?
Your unfollowing triggers?
How’s your checking the last time / who
he’s following / Why hasn’t he responded
to your hateful, don’t mean it text messages
problem? Your want to be a rapper problem?—
Your back on the bed, against the wall
on the pavement—just let it come / problem?
Welcome back, Ms. B: Love of My Life.
You gotta watch out for the “Ol’ Lesson.”
STROLOGY VIRGO
When he speaks of how wet Cape Verdean women get, tell him that’s the rain that never hits the land. The rain that never hits the land is despair. The rain that never hits the land is refuge. The rain that never hits the land is the sea anticipating cautious pregnant plants, planning the spark of an open mouth. Spend his birthday in Paris. Do not wish him well. Sweat and cigarette smoke and blisters tearing down your dancing body on the night of his day. Unaware unsettled, put un before it all. Before the weight of those black drums on a moving ship to Cape Verde, all those American ‘goods’ in search of recovery.
FOREIGN SUMMER REMEMBERED IN TRAFFIC
The goats inside the shed remember my shirt
lifeless collapsed on the side of the pool.
Here I am shedding empty casings
on the hour before dawn.
Other than the accent you place on my name
I don’t understand a word from you.
There is no old hat. There is no one I miss.
What am I going to give
the children I won’t have?
If I could get rid of anything, it’d be traffic.
I am open for you.
I am open to deceit, at the Basilica
you ask if skin and bone
are just the shaping of trees.
Sitting in traffic experiencing
a lightshow of sun hitting
leafless branches, hitting me
as the bus goes down the highway.
Here I am remembering the shed
outside the pool where I learned
in Kriolu, the word for condom
is the same as a baby’s shirt.
STROLOGY ARIES
Forcing forget on a Saturday in September is how you arrive at the sea. To address the time of day would mean to reveal how time spends itself around. Sand dollars have no heart. Ask the doctor to get it in writing and faxed to the nearest machine: Sand Dollars Have No Heart. Are people the skeletons of the lives they create? Is your location determined by physical capability or you are where you are from the wash up? Aries, here is what you need to know: organisms of the sea cannot be repulsed by chipped toenail polish. Put your feet in. Walk in shallow oceans with suede sandals. Make skeleton picking your brave new hobby like gathering what’s left of things fallen while you bathe. In bed with yourself, terror shall leave no part unkissed.
TONE’S POSTURE
It’s true—he will not call
no matter how close you place the phone to your breasts.
He carries a large briefcase filled with affliction.
If you don’t duck you’ll never learn that the wind is not failure.
Be quick &
you will still have time for dawn’s festivities.
When your phone is on the floor he will flood, you
will hear the melancholy in the back of his throat.
You know better than to accompany the act, every time
you think you spot him pulling up to the train station,
bend down slowly, tie the wind’s shoes.
He’ll miss your head when he actually comes,
flaunting all that restrained equilibrium.
FLUSH PAST THE FERRY
Two brief girls or two turkey vultures came lurking
on the bike route outside the church.
A wedding is just a speck in Edgartown.
To confess love while it’s under your nails
is to confess I’ve been drinking tap water.
It comes highly recommended.
Two brief girls or two turkey vultures
chase plastic into the ocean.
High tide and destiny continue on.
Don’t feel bad, the rest of the world still works.
STROLOGY SAGITTARIUS
Onions wouldn’t cut for you if you asked nicely. The way deer won’t voluntarily bleed on your lap. Imagine a deer hits you while en route to mass-produced cheesecake. Days do not ruin themselves, but whose day is ruined here? Mid-week, in the middle of primetime, the cable company cuts the wrong wire. Why isn’t that writer you’re fucking writing about you? Fancy yourself the small of his back. Squat the small of his island as you well up wet with every text message. No two arrive alike. Take the day’s juiced morning, blinds wide open and touch yourself toward his window (he finds this beautiful and pointless, but more beautiful). Reckon the ways you are never and always wrong. Now you’re both outside awaiting the technician, listening to each other miss visuals you’re too lazy to create.
SOMETHING AFRICAN WITH A K
In Virginia, years after, you got into gardening. Because you had lost your hair, you wanted to watch things grow. The baby you almost had would have set the table. You like to think of a girl because Tony said on the trolley back to his house that he would want to name her after his mother. But you thought her name was ugly. Despite your father being African, you thought the name was too African. But you love its American meaning. You never on
ce cooked for Tony in the dingy apartment overlooking the Boston skyline he shared with his brother. You think the baby would have been this tall girl who set the table, a girl named after her grandmother. Koshi. Kochi. Koshie. A silent letter anywhere, but you don’t remember because you said no. You told me you would call her Grace.
GREAT GENERAL OF IMPOSSIBLE BATTLES
The day I buried Bob
you went bowling
with a med student
I used to advise
on thrift store fashion.
Called you 19 times
wondered if she wore
the overalls or clownish
shapeless dress
I told her, is, absolutely
in this time
of year when you are
feeling like it’s time
to walk around inside
of your own freak
show.
Bob used to phone me
dressed in worry. He’d
heard I’d carried
my mattress outside
and slept in the dirt
so you’d know
I was ready
for battle.
You were not even home.
On the phone for hours
without mention of you
I asked Bob how to know
a good poem. He said,
Where did the poet
study writing?
Where did the poet
study fucking?
You brought me
to the thrift store
after I first stayed
the night.
My clothes stained
with confusion
damp even,
while I picked out
a plaid polo shirt
with silver buttons
running everywhere.
After I viewed the new
Bob just lying there,
I called you
from my home phone.
I still have a home phone.
You answered
on ring 20 but
I needed more ringing.
SOMEWHERE THERE’S A BABY ON THE LINE