Marina Carreira

Litany for the Surviving

            after Audre Lorde

Good god, the glimmering eye of a doe greeting the morning with a yawn

reminds me of the first time I went fishing. I was eleven, it was a Wednesday

swaddled in village summer. Elisabete, Pedro, and I took our jars to the creek,

confident we’d soon be proud owners of our very own tadpoles.

Before plunging my hand in, I marveled at the sun over the water’s surface:

a spread of crushed diamonds, fortress we would fist through for baby frogs.

I haven’t fished since, haven’t played by a body of water in years. I take

long baths to escape the dry heat of confinement, the invisible fog of virus,

the torrential tyranny over Washington, MAGA terror inflamed by black anger

and queer existence. What if we all went fishing or sat by a creek to watch

deer make their way across, praise the audacity of living? What a privilege

it is to own this imagination. This safe, wet skin. How dare I think of summer

and streams and fauna when so many children have yet to know the sweet

freedom of such things? When fascists imprint us with fear on the daily;

when the only thing glimmering is a black screen with breaking news.

Good God, how dare we survive ourselves, and how this?

It Is a Serious Thing Just To Be Alive

            after Mary Oliver and Brigit Pegeen Kelly

Take the goat. Raised as playmate to a girl,

Illiterate, oldest of seven. They cross field

after field, day after day, in search of

small wonders under the hot sun. Neither

the goat nor the child know what is to come,

that the bright joy between them is not meant

to last. It is a serious thing just to be alive,

to hold life in your arms, stroke it and smell it

and breathe it and feel the head call to the heart,

tell it there is no sweeter thing. The heart dies

of this sweetness. Months later, the goat

is slaughtered for a Sunday meal. The girl sits

at the table, hands wrung, hums a song she sang

to the animal days before. A bleating,

a bleeding, a jingle in the air, years after.

Requiem for Love at the End of The World

            after Marc Chagall’s Les Amantes au ciel rouge, 1950

here, baby, a bouquet

of veins and bones,

poppies and yarrow

wild as Revelation 6:12’s sky;

right now I’ll go anywhere

in this sinful body as long

as it’s with yours; I will

button each bloody bud

to our aching chest.

We will make prom

of the apocalypse,

dance our way to the end

of the world—this scorching

field where goats are free

from the cannibals’ table

and the sparrows circle,

sing fados they learned

from sailors sick of sea—

die a little death with me

on this red pyre;

become the pulp

children feast on,

the marrow of resilience

staining their mouths.