paulA neves
paulA neves is a Luso-American writer and multimedia artist. The recipient of the 2020 NJ Poets Prize from the Journal of NJ Poets, paulA is the author of the poetry chapbook, capricornucopia: the dream of the goats (Finishing Line Press 2018), the co-author (with Nick Kline) of the poetry/photography collection, Shirts & Skins (Shine Portrait Studio Press 2017), and the co-founder (with Boris Tsessarsky) of Parkway North Productions, which co-produced the short film Every Alien Pen, a selection at the 2019 NYC Independent Film Festival.
drought
a drought is upon us
though the river will rise
and the grandfather elms
that line the park’s footpaths
strewn with dog shit
though signs nailed to their trunks
threaten $50 fines
have garlands of dried leaves
around them.
it’s a scene more october
(halloween leaves, nothing else)
than august fraught
with every summer
of every decade
you no longer remember.
and the couple kissing on a bench?
they’re not together.
they just met.
one of them is married,
committed, and this is what was
once called an affair, booty call, hook up.
regardless, neither are bots;
they are into the slick of their lips,
know where to look
for water in a drought.
and the dead leaves don't trouble
the grown son walking with his mothers,
one of whom had him at 16,
another life, another drought
before they became,
nor the young girl guiding her tia and tio
(her parents deported, as good as the leaves),
the first generation to walk up
the city’s shrinking steps,
the worn rubber tips of their canes
tapping the ground like a metronome marking
the music of my name.
cuz don’t think they aren’t you, nor me,
nor the homeless dudes sleeping
in the shade of the tennis courts
where the luxury apartment club teams
act like nothing’s at stake but the volleys,
missiles just missing the high schoolers
flying their drones, skateboards, scooters,
and bird flips to the world
as extra as rain.
Uncited
…words—
whether we like it or not—
stand in a time of their own.
–Adrienne Rich
My mother has been absent 45 months. Has been.
The present perfect progressive tense describes
an action that began in the past, continues in the present,
and may continue into the future.
I find this definition, uncited, written in my daily
to do list, along with other doggerel
I riffle through to find the page
where I can cross off “pay property tax.”
She has been gone, as in, “I’m out!” three and ¾ years.
I pay the third quarter property taxes she used to jot
on the bakery or insurance agency wall calendar—
free at Christmas because that’s how
she kept American time, her themes cut out for her.
She will have been something four years soon,
her molecules rearranged, her clothes beginning to tell,
hung day and night in every closet, as ripe as July
peaches on the roofline branches of the tree she planted,
careful cultivar of Pathmark pits watered with sweat
and fertilized with could or would have, “modals
of lost opportunities,” which I cannot reach
the way I could not pluck the Adam’s apple of the man
who slowed his car at the corner of Monroe and Lafayette
years ago to troll “hey mama” the outlines of her blouse and skirt.
What could my seven-year old fists have done to him regardless
while holding my mother’s hand to cross the street?
Or to the man who tracked her in the maze
of Military Park’s underground garage one afternoon,
she mentioned off-hand decades later like a latter day
Ariadne unraveling the tacit threads of how to “survive,”
which might have helped me grasp the finer strands
of my first Manager’s remarks at my review that
“the man is always ready, “and not just to
UNQUOTE my English,
and that it sometimes helps if you smile.
But not a lot. Luckily, they will all have been
dead now longer than my count.
Will have. Molecules rearranged.
“The future perfect tense indicates that
an action will have been finished or perfected
at some point in the future.”
The Instant Affinity of Drift
for Barb, 1967-1990
At the top of the subway stairs I saw your seagull eyes,
sly, like creatures that have no business in deserts,
except to devour locusts. Transplant,
you floated above me in the New York City air,
beneath Andromeda that the city lights begrudged,
and I murmured, face as prologue.
Two minutes reunited we were already disputing
if bacalhau com natas is really just imperialist soul food.
You didn’t exactly say those words.
but I shot back anyway, “it feeds my Portuguese saudade,”
and you replied you didn’t care,
though you weren’t exactly you of course.
At some point you announced my heart is busted
not completely out of context,
like it was a pigeon someone’s back wheel
had just run over.
Or I said that. Or didn’t. All I know now is something
allowed our drift across the Brooklyn Bridge
to admire cables that pretend to hold us up,
and then you added, “I never liked this body,”
“But you didn’t hide it at the nude beach,” I joked.
You laughed and we discussed something else,
poetry or softball or the army,
and never mentioned anyone who’d leapt—
I knew I should have asked you what you meant.
And now I do:
different span, different rain, different bridge,
stones I keep in my pockets because I’ve been taught
there’s poetry in regret.