HOW TO END THINGS WELL
So what if someone finds you in a bathroom
kissing an archaeologist like you’ve just met.
Minimize his body into your body of work.
Hop off. Mid-ride.
Make a list of other things you can choke on:
candle wax, eucalyptus, string lights.
Eat so much you start to become the thing:
candle wax, eucalyptus, string lights.
Make a list of things you wouldn’t buy.
Clothespins. Drape yourself over yourself over
the archaeologist who’s a rapper who asked
if you carry lotion in your purse.
AN EMAIL RECOVERED FROM TRASH
Oct. 5, 2:14 p.m. Re: Home Swap
Somewhere a woman’s lease is up. Two numbers on speed dial: Boston’s best hospital for bullets and a real estate agent who aced his license exam, gels his hair. The firm is neutral for us to discuss. The woman calls him looking for a four-bedroom apartment. To keep from laughing before the joke hits, he quietly gags on his breath as he says, I know just from her name that she has Section 8. His candle quartz skin burns pink with delight. We are never together for too long.
He’s nothing like you. Not brown, not a creative. This story to say: I pray for you on the toilet every morning. I ask that you are lurking on my Instagram daily. A hole in my heart for the nights I made PowerPoint presentations of your body. My little discoveries. You take your shirt off now. Mostly, I ask that you thank me now and then and that you remember your face is a home.
Hey, don’t make this about race.
I know black men who gel their hair because it’s what keeps them together. This bit to say, I’m not sure I know how to fuck someone who is not afraid for his life.
Am I a millennial or am I dead.
I pray you’re creating. Someone different. Can you tell from my name, I’m still in search of a place to stay? I’m creating too, an aching homemade exit with reaction holes.
SELF ON THE FIRST DATE
You need the sun if you want to stop
fast action. The sun wins every single time.
The way it stands above you like everything
is going as planned, as thought. How it shines
on pregnant women on broken bikes
and bones, on unplanned pregnancies.
I’m sweating underneath the same purple pleated skirt
I got hit by a car in, or collided with a car in
or the sun opened its mouth
blew me to the ground in.
It looks different tonight.
Some kind of photo grid meant to be read
from right to left,
and I keep telling the story of being hit by a car
because I can’t remember
if the driver had his blinker on. I couldn’t stop
then I fell on my left side. In the street
so close to where I work,
a pregnant woman stops to ask if I’m okay.
The shape of her stomach from the concrete.
A coffee mug.
This is what comes to me in a dream: a huge belly
by an old dentist husband who is expecting
with his new lover. Going to appointments alone
walking around the office without a ring on.
There has to be a poem in looking this good
then dying on a bike. No helmet but a purple
pleated skirt. Sometimes at the light, my thick
thighs wear my shorts and men beep.
Photography is not about moments.
The rule of thirds makes a perfect sunset.
The worst time to take a photo is in the
middle of the day. I don’t carry mace.
The first thing you touch at the bar is my hair.
What you unearth you name volume. You
are named after a saint who carried a sword.
The second thing you touch is my lips.
I want to take a photo of you. All directives come
together. Fill the frame let the subject dominate
the image. Get as close as you possibly can.
The third thing you touch is a complex area
named by Natacha in high school. Chichos.
You reference conflicts in the Middle East.
There’s no time for spot metering. Your eyes
are moving too fast, you’re casting all the light
even when you describe me as full of hope, labeling
everything as up and coming as on the rise
as getting there. I’m ignorant to international
conflict. I started in the womb with my own.
Mostly unaware but I know disturbance. Bullet wounds
in Beirut. Bullet wounds in Boston. Your sword
is in the way you stare with openness.
Men don’t share where I’m from.
I feel your knuckles as if I know how a surgeon’s knuckles
should knead. I think they’re soft.
You show me every spot where they are not. I want
to lick the redness until I see a boy on the train ride home
staring out the window. His father wants to know
if there’s anything good out there. Horrible
he whispers, but he doesn’t turn his curly head.
THIS WON’T MAKE SENSE IN ENGLISH
kanala v. travel; walk; get out of the house
I told my uncle I forgive him then I walked to the dance floor
LIBERATION
I count gulls until they spasm
into numbers, until I grasp
a number never uttered. I ration
dignity like crackers to last
when my own words pan
dust into the mouth of a little gull.
I am a cracker to the plan.
Little gulls are black and full.
Little girls are running around
in pink two pieces. I call for cover,
an unspecific temp job, brown
as the wanting of erasure.
On the last day of work,
my boss said being black
is a box for checking. I smirked
and danced my hips inside the square.
Little gulls feed me not.
I like beaches, and I like counting
until I reach a number rot-
ten with plans. I’m just lounging
on a beach chair waiting
for the girls’ laughter as the gulls hang
like check marks. Boxing black slang.
My noise so liberating
it asks to be no one.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My warmest gratitude to the journals and editors for publishing versions of this work:
A Bad Penny Review, Atlas Review, Awl, Boston Mayor’s Office of Arts and Culture, Colorado Review, Mass Poetry, Minnesota Review, No Tokens Journal, PANK, Rhino, some mark made, Sundog Lit, Virginia Quarterly Review.
One time for the readers of letsjusteatcheese.
To my parents, Roberta Taylor, Luisa Barbosa, Irlando Barbosa, thank you for carrying me, feeding me, for giving me this warm, strange light.
To my siblings India Taylor, Kyla Barbosa, Aina Lott, Malick Barros, Nisaiah Barbosa—thank you for the constant reminder that everything I do is to and for y’all.
Thamani Tomlin Norton, thank you for allowing me to sit on top of your washing machine.
Bob Morales, I am working out my issues. By my 200th birthday, I will be perfect. I will also probably be in a jar.
Adriana Cloud, Michalla DaSilva, Nakita Barros, Joey and Zane Barbosa, Caron Taylor, Damon Coleman, Denise DePina Dubuisson, Waverly Coleman, Amanda Barros, Courtney Villón, Tania DeBarros, Leah Veaudry, Telma Tavares, Jenny Tavares, Nicole Vengrove Soffer, Sydney Brown, Sue Rainsford, and Laura Gill; thank you for your tremendous love, encouragement, and support, thank you for the listening, reading, dancing, eating, wine, whiskey, words, memes, pray
ers, cards, crystals, candles, sage, patience—thank you for watering my plants. Thank you for showing me what it means to feel at home in the world.
Special delivery kind of thanks to Joshua Bell, thank you for 9:17. Deepest appreciation to the faculty and students at the Bennington College MFA program. Thank you to Megan Mayhew-Bergman, Kathleen Graber, Ed Ochester, Gregory Pardlo, Major Jackson, Mark Wunderlich. My Rockport loves: Simeon Berry, Abigail Mumford, Heather Hughes, thank you. For the time and space to write, thank you to the Martha’s Vineyard Writing Residency and the Writers’ Room of Boston.
To everyone who’s ever said keep going,
keep going.
Cape Verdean Blues Page 4