Save the Bathwater

Marina Carreira

A Dissertation submitted to the

Graduate School-Newark

Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey

in partial fulfillment of the requirements

for the degree of

Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing

Rutgers University – Newark MFA Program

Written under the direction of

Cynthia Cruz

And approved by

Jayne Anne Phillips

______

Newark, New Jersey

May 2014

Acknowledgements

To family, friends, and MFA folks: for their constant support and kindness.

To Rigoberto González: this work would not exist without his careful eye and candid wisdom.

To Cynthia Cruz: for her remarkable advice and insight.

For Avó, my muse.

iii

Contents:

In the Cemetery Where My Grandparents are Buried 1

After Emigration 3 Bloodlines 4 A Grand-Love 5 The Old Yellow House 6 Save the Bathwater 7 Luso-American Ephemera in Avó’s Old Armoire 8 Poem for Avô's Hands 9 Mercurochrome 10 Day of the Dead 11 Madrugada 12 An Ugly Thing 13 A Bird Watches My Grandfather Age 14 Shrinking Violet 15 Portuguese Olive Oil 16 Thread 17 These Days 18 Eucalyptus 19 The Morning After Your Death 20 Os Velhinhos 21

II.

Saudade 23 First Generation 24 A Girl's Fado 25 Letter to My Stillborn Brother 26 The First Real Memory I Have of My Father 27 Bedtime Story, or Monsters 28 The “My Guardian Angel” Painting on Avó’s Living Room Wall 29 Ironbound 30 Bodega Blues 31 These Walls 33 Poem for Suzy 34 Papi 35 Parque da Market Street 36

Tomatoes and Onions 37 Parque dos Mosquitos 38 Crushing Snails 39 Dying Twice 40 Our Lady of Something 41 Summers in Fanhais 42 Across from the Village Church 43 In the Shadows of an Orange Grove 44

In the Cemetery Where My Grandparents are Buried cats glide between graves looking for the perfect place to curl up and glare at the caretakers crushing colored glass for the plots of the villagers who died impoverished. Dried-up bouquets petalling the in-betweens of the burials remind me of trails my sister and I made behind Avó’s house. Blissful, we’d leave chickenfeed and newspaper scraps and venture out, our basket packed with lemon soda and cheese sandwiches. The skeleton pines welcomed us with their stiff, bony arms. August made the ground sandy, and the neighbor’s doves rolled over us in little waves. The wind would blow away parts of our path. Back then, losing the way home never scared us; today, never feeling so alive again does.

After Emigration

In the distance, a train kills a lost dog.

It happens all the time in my grandmother’s village: small things crushed. But who is ever there to witness it, to tell the story?

Bloodlines

Even in the dark, I’m ashamed of my lemon breasts, my peach-fuzzed midsection. I want to go back home to my father. To my bed with the threadbare blanket, the hand-carved cross over the headboard. I want a God-fearing man, hands roughed by fields.

Augusto is a pretty boy with a new blue bicycle. He rides into the next town, buys all the things my mother assures me will make for a good life. But the patch of blood on the bed sheets promises different, promises thorns no bread or gold can dull.

II.

In America, I’m a maid at the Ramada , I rent an apartment on Market. Broken English and bad fruit. Pigeons as pets. My two children in a one-bedroom. A Technicolor TV with antennas sky-high. Double-locked doors. Barred windows.

An ironbound city, the unfamiliar cacophony: honks of trailer horns, the bloody spur of factory smoke, the brandied laughter of construction workers. I try to sing the lullaby I’d hum to my brothers in the dark over the news anchor’s Más lluvia para mánana!

III.

Tonight, my granddaughter sits in my kitchen and considers the importance of bloodlines, waits for the words to pop like champagne grapes. My blood from my veins into her veins until we are both blue with life. Outside, the song gulls sing as they look for food separates the wind from the hymn of pine needles. She writes a poem to remember me, to remember it all-- sweat and tears, ancestry, and of course blood to run roots through my future great-granddaughter’s bones.

A Grand-Love

When the snake bit my hand, sunk its teeth deep into the blue bed of my fist, dropped its venom into my slippery vein, you grabbed it by the mouth, squeezed its jaw open, sliced its head off in one fiery sweep. You would do it, too, outside of dreams. Save me from snakes, men with the allure of nineteenth-century vampires. You would behead the devil himself, offer me his horned skull on a silver platter. Be Judith on Holofernes’ lap, blade behind back. You’d hold no pity for Antoinette or John the Baptist. Thick like mud, your love. Bloody. Every head rolls towards my feet, a token, of how deep.

The Old Yellow House

The old yellow house, now coral with brown trim. Unrecognizable, except for the onion-domed roof, the careful fog surrounding it. I still remember the gray walls, spider-veined. The burning bush television with crooked antennas. Avó’s shady bedroom, the huge hand-carved rosary, the billowing blue curtains between it, shading away the grit and grime of Market and East Ferry. The scuffed, stuffed armoire with its loose, mothball teeth. An empty pigeon cage in the kitchen, the chouriças hanging upside down from the oven hood. My milk bottle half-full underneath the plastic couch. A different house now, since you moved back home to Portugal, since they tore down the Dairy Queen to put up a bank, more condos. This house is now home to azaleas and rubber trees, Mexican children, tamales, cumbia, and menthol cigarette smoke. Our Lady of Fatima now Guadalupe. Our old stuff in boxes, in city dumps, in memory, in ashes. Only the shell remains constant: its hallway, a bottom-black well, its windows, golden fish gills out of water. At night, I imagine it sighs but never says a word.

Save the Bathwater

Human nature is like water. It takes the shape of its container. –Wallace Stevens

In America, people don’t bathe in each other’s leftover water, but when he was a boy the trough was emptied after the last pig feeding, after his younger brothers had their turn; his naked body would shiver something awful standing in it. Three buckets of used water heated by after-dinner fire— the rinse. Avô’s wasted no water ever since.

My skin cells, hair, and navel lint floating around him didn’t matter. This residue was a reminder that I always woke up to bread, that he sweat in the face of a steam presser. With the same certainty he knew birds flew further south, trains arrived through Penn Station with their usual hoot. A little money was saved.

He sets a cup of water on the night stand, considers his shoddy leg, his wife’s cough: the things water won’t wash off.

Luso-American Ephemera in Avó’s Old Armoire

Page from a Portuguese passport stamped one-way: 1973, USA. Old coins the color of a lizard’s tongue. Tassle from the lip of my grandfather’s Sunday loafer. Ace of spades curled at the corners, reeking of Winston cigarettes. Polaroid: my father’s youth league soccer team. My baby tooth charm, dangling off a broken bracelet. Christmas card: the blue of “Boas Festas” fading. NJ Transit ticket stub: BROAD STREET stop. Funeral prayer card for Alberto Silva, village baker. Flyer: Amália at Carnegie Hall. Penny candy wrappers, crinkled, smelling of coat pocket. Postcard of Nazaré: a fisherman’s wife in seven skirts, with love, Tia. Gold medal of St. Antonio: restorer of lost objects, but never brought back anything worth saving.

Poem for Avô’s Hands

You look at them carefully, wonder how they got from that little boy’s arms to yours. Little raven-haired, bird-like boy who’d run from his house every morning after stuffing corn bread in his mouth, wiping away chalky crumbs with a flannelled sleeve. Run past the olive fields to join the others in stick-and-stone play until his father came to pull him away by the ear.

With the years, your hands out-grew the village, dreamt of gold rings and savings bonds, made their way overseas, employing needle and thimble and thread. The midnight shifts making A-line skirts and black-tie suits by the open window, the Passaic aglow with headlights and neon. So much a dollar could get you in end-of-century America; so far your son could go if he really tried.

This afternoon, an apple, exceptionally red for a cold spring, is an elephant in your palm. You sit on an upside-down crate, look at your hands and wonder, Where did the time…

Mercurochrome

First the unmerciful burn and then the balm cool of blown air. Finally, Avó lets the liquid spill over and stain the scrapes and bruises until my elbow or knee or palm streams with alligator tears.

I would be red for days, the scarlet-tinted spots of skin like ribbons on kite tails. Nowadays, when hurts crow-feet and frown-line, I search for her breath, for the cure-all tincture in her apron pocket.

Day of the Dead

You were born on the Day of the Dead. But we are Portuguese and don’t celebrate Mexican holidays. Still, I call you as soon as I shake off the ghosts from my dreams, shout “Happy Birthday!” as if from the window, and not three thousand miles away. “Look at you, eighty-one!” "Isn’t that something?” you respond. Time flies for you as if every year were a bird that just learned to take wing, every breeze it broke through a moment in the bedroom, each dive down to earth a memory of Christmas past. An errant feather, a light reminder of the fallen.

Lying in bed after we hang up, I light a candle and hope your hands somehow cup this light.

I imagine the skull inside you with a marigold in each socket; your bones, brittle as sugar cubes, dancing gaily until the muscles around your elbows, knees expand to knock like a heart still beating.

Madrugada

You say you only dream de madrugada that pulsing between midnight and dawn from charcoal to citrine the world, only half- lit by the shadows of a nightingale’s wings. You (and the physical world) hold breaths in anticipation.

II.

The dream is the contraction.

III.

As long as the rooster comes to crow you say there will be a morning. I learned as long as the church bell tolls there will be mourning.

More often than not, Love is a homonym.

At this hour all of me fits into a cat’s-eye.

An Ugly Thing

Snapping bay leaves from their stem, Avó sends my grandfather to gather wood and pine cones for the fire. He comes back with small, splintered pieces; she lets the rabid dog loose in her throat.

I assure her it’s fine, these will do, but she pounds on the table, shakes walnuts, raisins, cheese from their plates. He sighs between her yelling, kisses me goodnight at five in the afternoon. Avó sits with me, the weight of eighty years spiraling bones like tree rings. The crack and fold of skin, the loosening of wires. An ugly thing. The sound of time through her body: the hiss of newsprint on fire.

A Bird Watches My Grandfather Age

No time and all the time in the world to rock back and forth aimlessly, he refuses to drag around a polished stick.

Instead, he does wobbly laps around the house on a withered leg, curses the imaginary cold of June.

Since dementia, his eyes are two calves kneeling; his hands, opened wild orchids. When the sky coughs up a small storm, finger by finger folds into his pockets. Typical, he mutters. How is anything supposed to grow?

Shrinking Violet

On nights when the moon is a busker, my granddaughter asks me again about the sugar sacks me and my seven siblings would suck on before sleep. Blue scraps of fabric filled with sweet grains and tied with carpet strings, a primitive pacifier placed in our mouths to pass us into the land of dreams. Oh dreams! What are dreams but circus clowns while we sleep?

We dip yesterday’s bread in olive oil, feast on goat cheese and drink wine mixed with Seven-Up. My mind wanders off to days before my parents had pruned skin, our home more than the rocky bones of a building. I tell her stories of São Mamede: early morning olive-picking; face-washing in the pig trough by the well. Father watching, adoring, alongside dirt paths cleared by a mule’s long days. Stubborn goats and restless sheep; stubborn restless sleepless nights on potato sack-covered hay.

She listens in earnest, picks a scab that’s formed a comma on her knee. Some tales are pink-powdered elephants, some stories are old, ancestral bones. On afternoons when the sun is a shrinking violet it’s her job, I tell her, to know the difference.

Portuguese Olive Oil

Your granddaughter wanted to bring me back home with her. My yellow-green-- a held-breath, a forgotten lake.

Thick, and extra virgin, I remind her of your girlhood before shoes were an everyday luxury.

At the bottom of the pan, I pop and sparkle like the cheeks of stars, the eyes of a bird before a worm.

I’m on her little kitchen table like a cooking goddess; she rubs me on her cuticles, dips me in her bread.

She wants to feel my dolphin-skin roll between her fingers before I was crushed and poured into a wine bottle.

Wants to know the moments before the back of your hands were torn stockings, before your teeth came out for air.

Too dangerous to bring back, you said. The bottle might break and ruin with the careless baggage handlers, the high altitudes.

She risks it anyway, wraps me in your old gray sweater and nestles me between scarves and shiny red boots.

In America, I am stored between Canola and Crisco, oils that ruin the flavors of sardines and broa. Your granddaughter’s cabinets are filled with canned and boxed things that you warn will fatten her in the wrong places. No matter how many trinkets she brings back, she can only bring you back in spirit, into her cold sterile kitchen. She will never know you as a young bride of nineteen, or a mother of three at thirty-two, or any other way but varicose-veined and unabashedly bitter.

Thread

Wet the tip a little she said, rubbing the thin string between her fingers. It should slide easy as pie through the eye.

Avó always had a tender way of teaching, a tempered way of leaving no hole unseamed no button unfastened no heart unmended.

On afternoons when a few buds struggle to blossom on a sickly branch against the grey-brown of sky, I fear the things in life a needle can’t repair. But her aprons, almost all of them with a stitch of yellow-- little zephyrs zooming through hems-- remind me We are rooted somewhere, that love will always make everything supple.

I pick some pink that breaks through clouds. Thread by thread, wrap it around my wrists and remember her hands holding my shirts up to the light; never, ever a loose end.

These Days

Small and skeletal as a newborn chick, Avô whistles a tune his stepmother would hum before heading to the fields.

His eyes, pools of April rain on a sunny rooftop, blink to church bells marking the lunch hour. He grabs an apple, thumbs the dirt off its sides, takes a slow bite. He walks with my mother to the gate and asks her, You’ll take me to the doctor tomorrow, right, Grace? After she kisses him good-bye, she reminds him that she’s leaving in the morning for the States, that she will only return next summer. He watches a spider work, cars zoom by. Time is a wind that erodes moments once framed, storied, argued over. He can’t remember the Alien Invader and Spanish Senorita Halloween costumes he made me in my youth, but wonders if American men still get their suits hand-tailored, what the cost of that is these days.

Eucalyptus

People my age should be dead already.

I pretend not to hear you talk about dying. I sing along instead with the supermarket jingle on television.

Bones splintering apart, joints shucking from sockets. Nerves—split wires.

Any day now. This could be it, the last time we see each other.

I think of the eucalyptus down the road, stripped of their bark. Bony and stark, but alive. Standing after so many years at arm’s length from one another.

The Morning after Your Death

Pai and the rest of your sons sat in silence around the dusty kitchen table— their heads like willow trees on a windless day.

II.

No one would go upstairs with me to your room. Your sandalwood cologne lingered in the dim corridor. I touched the old cobalt comforter rolled up in the corner, the fabric yellowed from the passing of time.

No one ran their fingers around the brim of the black felt fedora that covered your head for seventy-three winters and seventy-two summers.

No one went down with me to the orange grove, sat at the edge of that ancient well where you used to catch your breath and wipe sweat from your brows after hand over hand, row by row you tended the endless soil where you died.

III.

You would pluck a ripe orange off the branch and skin it with your steel pocketknife, the long peel curling like a pig’s tail, dropping to the earth as silent as your walk home.

Os Velhinhos

Bless the way black scarves cover the sparse clouds of hair, faces creased like fresh bread under brows, knuckles like raisins. The stillness of weathered bodies on porches, rocking away mid-afternoon summers, a primordial part of the landscape, as if they’ve always existed, they’ve always been part of Moment. The bird beak tap of fingers on wooden arms of chairs, eyes fixed on horses at rest, the heavens like stars are puzzle pieces only they’ve put together. Their silence, as if every Bom Dia! and Boa Tarde! in the world have been said.

Saudade

You left me and the old yellow house on Market St. fifteen years ago. But still, you flood the sewers of my memory until every cell is a third story apartment flowered with rosewater. At dusk, you are that hard roll of an R from a woman down the street, damning her husband to hell. I am that girl again in jelly sandals humming Madonna, watching her doll fall out the window, crying for her grandmother to fly down and fetch it.

First-Generation

We land on grass-cracked cement, school bus spewing smoke on sneakers that no longer light up. Latch-key, wet and too cool for umbrellas, no one waits in the afternoon to figure out math or Mark Twain. They work late, they come home late. We land in bodegas for cheap sodas and cigarettes. Curse in Avô’s tongue, R’s spinning and unraveling like spools of blue, guttural rolls. We are the tame horses wild with lovedreams, galloping past streets, states, oceans, back to childhood summers where we’d meet lovers at midnight amongst hungry pines speckled with darkness. We petal, then bruise. We, the apples unripened, ripped off well before harvest. We land in adolescence, never come of age.

A Girl’s Fado

Se eu soubesse que morrendo tu me havias de chorar por uma lágrima tua que alegria me deixaria matar. “Lágrima”– Amália Rodrigues

I learned sadness like a hunger felt in the middle of the night watching my grandmother turn the pages of her Bible.

It wasn’t a real hunger like the kind she suffered as a child— a plate barely filled with cabbage and beans on a good day— but an ache she sat with every morning till past noon, this lament no one’s hands could grasp, no one’s shoulder could bury.

My grief wasn’t illiteracy or a loveless marriage, but a shade as deep— a knowing but un-having. A blue so black my heart purpled on the playground watching wind move leaves, an ant carry a breadcrumb, a swinging girl smiling over her father’s shoulders.

I learned how to cry watching my mother love my father: redden the face first, bellow out till lungs almost collapse, then let the body shake then slack until it’s so damp all moisture funnels out eyes first. Last, the deep sigh, like Earth groaning at winter’s first show. Some nights my sadness released when she’d lie, asking WhyGodwhydidImarrythisman?

A slow stream of lava over her cheeks, neck, a river of red down the bed. I swore we’d drown side by side unless

Our Lady’s pity was taken upon us: a poor dandelion dried up too soon, another still yellow but on the brink of airborne bones.

Letter to my Stillborn Brother

I imagine you have our father’s eyes, dark and deep set into his olive face, or maybe our mother’s fair skin and wispy hair, like me. Like our sister, you are red and quick to anger if forced to eat anything green. As a child, you secretly watch sparrows nest-build in the morning, after we run barefoot through the forest in back of our house in Portugal, every pine needle and pebble lodging into the in-betweens of our toes. We take turns rubbing each other’s wounds, hiding each other’s bloody Band-Aids in Avó’s basement.

As an adult, you are all soccer and cigarettes. Mom forces you to pick us up from school in your shitty Volkswagen. I worry every time you stay out past midnight but never admit to it when you wobble home, cock a smile and say Whatchya doin’ up bookworm? You take after our youngest uncle and become a mechanic. I discourage you from marriage and red meat.

Your hands massive but beautiful, hold apples and eggs, make them the tiniest treasures.

The First Real Memory I Have of My Father

Mom dragged me with her to find my father, on his usual stool at Rio Lima, on his nth Budweiser, a Winston hanging from his lips like a broken limb.

Aqui, claro, filho da mae! she whispered, when a fool as drunk as my father slid in front of her, flattered her: brown eyes, dark as earth, Like my mother’s, he said before my father’s fist struck his face like a tire iron, breaking his nose in four different places. I wore his blood on my collar like a crest. Beaming on the walk home, I examined it as scientist and schoolboy. It wasn’t my fight, this terrible act of honor.

But it made my mother beautiful, my father forgivable. He was finally taking matters into his own hands, I reminded myself that night. Doing the right thing. Respect. Letting no one fuck with what’s his.

All that I’d commit to memory by teenage-hood. But at seven, the stain was proof. Love. No matter how much my mother scrubbed, the damned blood never came off, permanent as a birthmark.

Bedtime Story, or Monsters

They fell from the chimney in parts. Their hairy black hearts, the last to drop into the hearth. Sometimes, their eyes.

Too big to slide down in one piece, they tore off a rib here, a foot there. By the time they fit, half-moon bones cracked in the fire, too much blood was lost. With no other way in, they waited like wounded birds.

At bedtime, my sister and I held rosaries like flaming swords, muttered “Hail Marys” between commercials. The years passed; no proof of their presence on the roof, no ghastly limbs on our lawn. With folklore no longer stick or stone, they found other ways in - broken bathroom mirrors, late-night neon signs, empty wine bottles.

Slowly, their hide grew over our hands like wet bark. Their guttural moans lodged in our throats like crushed glass.

The “My Guardian Angel” Painting on Avó’s Living Room Wall

What happened to the Technicolor angel? His fire-white wings flapping gloriously against the snakeskin green sky on those Saturday nights of my youth? Did the heavenly blond finally give up and fly off, arms exhausted of extending over Hansel and Gretel on a breaking footbridge?

Avó told me he hung around like an old, invisible dog, but I never saw a shadow and thought, There it is! Still, I believed, especially when it rained for what felt like forty days and forty nights, and the wily sun would light up the living room like a royal wedding, I believed. No, he wasn’t the gallant pink hero from the painting. My guardian angel was a dry dandelion splitting the sidewalk-- inconspicuous, but there-- to pray to, to blow away.

Ironbound

Newark, NJ

My hands grew fat as dahlias, waiting for the train that never came. Blood thinned with Riverbank water darker than a murder of crows. I made the orange concrete fortress in the park my lungs, each breath carefully guarded against sirens wailing like newborns. The neighbors swarmed Portuguese bakeries and barbecues after church, exchanged morsels of gossip as peasants did cheese. My bastardized tongue up and down Ferry St. My feet dragged past Five Corners stores covered in Special! signs. Eyes dropped like flattened soccer balls, I shrank when older girls with blooming breasts walked down the street, perfuming the air with Heaven Scent and their mother’s shame.

Men hid violin-stringed smiles in the bar where my father left me sitting on the red stool until night fell on my neck, until I became the plastic plant no one dusted. Still, the extraordinary existed when Avó’s pigeons flew out after breakfast, the gasoline-rainbow of their wings over Ironbound like a promise from God.

Years before the bouquet of my palm dried, the east side skulled my dreams. These railroad tracks were my bones.

Bodega Blues

You can tell a lot about a fella's character by whether he picks out all of one color or just grabs a handful. – Ronald Reagan

At age eight, sixty-one cents gets me sixty-one Swedish fish. All the soft red comfort I need after a day of the alphabet in two languages and a lunch lady who deems me “stocky enough” for one serving. Half the red gummies never see my grandmother's door as I imagine them swimming in my stomach like jarred fireflies. Sometimes I pull them as far as they’ll stretch just to see if they shriek.

Other times, I swallow them whole to spare their suffering, simultaneously punishing myself for my cruelty, my gelatinous gluttony.

I never share, and Avô knows better than to ask for one. My medicine I say to his smirk as we turn the corner, leaving Mr. Hidalgo to his crates of penny candy, bruised carrots, menthol cigarettes.

II.

Mr. Hidalgo never questions why I stay with my grandparents on the weekend. When Avó is bleaching floors or smoking chouriça, I make a run before dinner, before I know he’s ready to turn the hard plastic OPEN to CLOSED. How much, nena he asks, as I spill whatever leftover coins I’ve saved from school lunch. Just enough, as I move pennies across the scuffed grey counter. He smiles slow

32 as tea steam and tells me You’ve got the saddest smile in the world. He bags my candy, and I think how lucky the store cat’s got it: sleeping on bread all day, ambivalent, unstirred by broken glasses, trickle down economics, a forecasted long winter.

These Walls

I. thin they are orchid petal thin

Monarch butterfly thin starling wing

like blueberry skin

II.

I hear every furious Foda-se! through these walls.

The question marks demand, the exclamation points dare: Leave! Come back. Get out!

Every scream a goddamn curl.

III.

I ask to paint them black, to sound proof

My mother says No

Why surround yourself with such darkness?

A Poem for Suzy

When you were six months old, I held you like the girl who would eventually steal my favorite Barbie.

I tried to drown you once, grabbing your legs like apricot-skinned twigs. I slid you under lukewarm water. With suds still clinging to my hair, I watched your eyelids blink furious as butterflies emerging from swollen cocoons. Bubbles rose from your pursed lips like a little row of psalms and you were angelic, and still, until our mother pulled you from the bathtub, and you broke the surface with a tiny wail. I don’t know why I did it. Tried to squelch such innocence. Perhaps

I imagined a demon inside you, able to breathe in all atmospheres. Perhaps I was punishing you for stealing Avó’s affections. Or really, I think I was trying to save you from becoming my little sister.

Papi

Maybe it was from the Mexican telenovelas Mom watched that I endeared myself to the word, to calling you Papi instead of Pai. No other Portuguese kid addressed their father that way, gave him a title the sound of birds in a birdbath. The day came when I could no longer call you Papi. Your Cuban coworker told you it meant “playboy” more than it did “father”. You became Pai, never “Daddy” because we spoke English in school, Portuguese at home but also because I couldn’t conceive of you in such sweet English. Pai the laborer. The breadwinner. The boss. Pai is so funny and nice when he’s drunk. Until he’s not. Sometimes I slipped and yelled Papi when I got an A+ on vocabulary tests or Mom made lasagna instead of bacalhau. You would shout back Yeah! from the bathroom, newspaper rolled underneath your arm, cigarette smoke trailing behind like a beggar child.

Parque da Market Street

Riverbank Park, Newark, NJ

Forearms perched on the playground fence, I watch my granddaughter pick dandelions, one by one into her skirt pocket like mementos. Doesn’t bother to blow them away, she’s the kind of child who knows to respect the dead.

My own mother, dried flowers six feet above her now ashed body, would say She has your calm. Your wife’s grit. Her mother’s hands. As she gathers, dogs glide through the October air, egg-white and crisp, like a prayer bound to bone.

Fifteen-year-old girls walk arm-in-arm, eyes cool as ice, lips blood-red with life. A tumble of leaves swirl on the pavement, scaring the dogs behind the thinning bushes. Behind a yellow-orange sunset, saudade has never felt more like a sacrament.

Tomatoes and Onions

The little girls next door sat in their backyard Indian-style and ate tomatoes and onions. Raw.

The clear-sometimes-pink juices streaked the parentheses of their cheeks, stained the U-shaped collars of their tiny dresses.

From across the wired fence I smelled the sweet and sting lift off the places their ten-year-old teeth bit through.

I stared when they closed their eyes, chewed with gusto; I smiled, nodded No when they reached their lanky arms across and asked, want some?

Craving their thin, new-penny shine, my doughy fingers scraped the bottom of a potato chip bag.

Inside, my grandmother assured me that they were the aliens, that there was nothing wrong with my constant hankering for hot dogs and tripe stew.

The little bit of belly bulged out beneath my t-shirt— Baby fat, she called it. Besides, normal children don’t eat vegetables like fruit.

Parque dos Mosquitos

Independence Park, Newark, NJ

Tangerine, marrow, young copper spread thin over sparse grass and graveled trails bicycles ballet through. Mosquitos are the musk of summer while children circle an aging fountain, create waterholes for pigeons and ants. The hibiscuses are dying while flinches float oak tree to oak tree. By five, a harvest moon over the canopy of an old woman’s fingers. A latticework wind fragments her white shawl.

Crushing Snails

I’d pluck them from the garden wall and line them up to race. Coax my cousin into playing too, but he’d cry after my fist flattened the losers against the cement. The crackled shells like confetti, the slime hardened like paste in the sun. I’d kick them towards a mound of soft earth; no burial for the feeble. I had power as a child, taking the lives of small creatures.

A power that parents, food, and the dark had over me. But it left my grasp— shriveled like a snail beneath salt. I’m still not fast enough. I’m still not strong enough. The finish line is always the horizon.

Dying Twice

Last night, a woman threw herself from the Sitio in Nazaré and survived. Three ribs and a broken leg, but otherwise, a miracle. Our Lady had spared her, everyone said. The second time she wasn’t so lucky. She lifted her arms, flipped her feet off. Broken and bent over jagged rock, her body beaded with rain.

When I was a teenager, Avó said: She will never save you twice. But she will forgive you a hundred million times. That’s an infinite amount of mercy for one lifetime.

I stared into the well, its mouth a hungry stone. I imagined myself floating face down, deep violet haloing my head. My father would not see my belly bulging like a slit rag doll. My mother would weep at the sight of my nine-year-old limbs, the baby eels of my hair. I would lie there long enough for a frail seeing, for Our Lady to sweep under, press her lips to mine and breathe a second life into me. After this brush with death, for sure they’d love me twice as much.

Our Lady of Something

Avó donated enough to the church in the summer of ‘91 to make us angels in the feast day’s parade. I felt hallowed, indigo-shrouded, bird-thin hands feathered in ceremony. We walked the entire village, a two-mile journey that felt like twenty, following four men with beaded foreheads and uncuffed shirts. A sweltering sun burned the tin of our halos, and my sister's wings kept slipping off her back. The dust kicked up by canes and tap-tapping toddlers caked our ankles as cars sat audience to our devotion. With every step, I waited for roses to fall out of the sky, for the sun to spin, for holy water to drop down from the heavens. For Dona Rosa to walk again, for Senhor Mario to suddenly see.

Instead, Our Lady returned to her corner of the small church, her prodigious presence now a spider’s shadow. De-winged,

I swung on the playground across the street, sky rocking, the salt from my tears breaking whatever light was left on my face.

Summers in Fanhais

Oranges

From my rusting red tricycle, they’re big as Earth. Avô’s oranges— the envy of the village, their dewy, bubbled skin seducing every trembling branch in the breeze. In slices, on the table after lunch, I bring one to my lips and draw out a daydream of me as a bee whirling about the garden, the nectar of sunflowers on my tongue, my hum-buzz the only way I know to say I am here.

Camarinhas

I spend hours plucking each translucent orb from prickly shrubs, careful not to pop and spill their sweet-tart juice before they make it into the basket. They grow nowhere else. in the world, my cousin tells me, a thick thrill bursting from behind her glasses. Like fishermen’s wives, we wait by the roadside for a car to slow and admire our collection.

Cem escudos, I tell the Frenchman who stops to humor me. He hands me coins hot from palm sweat on a warm-apple afternoon, enough for gelado and a pastel de nata.

Pine Cones

How they scrape my ass as I shift in the moon beaming forest floor, take turns from top to bottom, sometimes sideways. Splinters catch in my dress like souvenirs.

I think myself sexiest after midnight, a feline out to stretch her legs on memorized trails, eyeing her lover like a slit in a stocking. At fifteen, salt air is enough for the smallest of sparks.

Sometimes the lake, if I don’t want to ruin a particular pair of shorts. In the dark, his hands are silver eels, swimming over me: a blonde hurricane, goose-fleshed, vulnerable, pine-sapped.

Across From the Village Church

Portugal, 1993

While the men play dominoes on peeling benches, I sit cross-legged, lean into the shadow of a summered pine. The clacks of hard plastic count off minutes in Fanhais, where scarves of wind blow green across railroad tracks, broomed verandas and rest atop trickling creeks. Snails form a funeral procession around carefully placed stones. In the distance, donkeys trot towards the postcard chapel where my parents were married, where a widow prays for her late husband, cupping a sweaty rosary.

In the Shadows of an Orange Grove

A cat stretches its paws out in defeat. There’s a picture of me and you squeezing it the way children do when they mean to love. All three of us - smiling and squirming and squinting, our eyes like sealed envelopes; the cat’s, two closed button holes.

I don’t remember its name, if we loved it, or how it died. I don’t even remember a time after this when we were so knit in our joy. The loneliness every piece of gravel carried under our shoes after school, our parents’ see-saw marriage, the comfort we sought in Southern Comfort- it all eventually unraveled the knot.

But it was warm that day, so warm the sun chafed the oranges until they sweat; sat down on our cheeks and painted them apricot-on-fire. Avó was somewhere plucking chickens for dinner. We had the whole afternoon to bare our teeth at Mom’s camera, to chase a cat in the shadows of an orange grove.