Marina Carreira
Marina Carreira is a queer Luso-American writer and multimedia artist from Newark, NJ. She is the author of Save the Bathwater (Get Fresh Books, 2018) and I Sing to That Bird Knowing It Won’t Sing Back (Finishing Line Press, 2017). She has work featured in Queen Mob’s Teahouse, Paterson Literary Review, The Acentos Review, Pittsburgh Poetry Review, Hinchas de Poesia, wildness journal, and Harpoon Review. Marina has exhibited her visual art in several group exhibitions and festivals in New Jersey. She is founding member of “Brick City Collective,” a Newark-based multicultural, multimedia group working for social change through the arts.
Tanto Tanto
Joy like the pit of a dusty peach
inside the dark when you drum
on the steering wheel in traffic,
when my leg crosses over yours
in a sleepy wave, when finches fly
from your mouth like psalms.
I’m impossibly full but still ravenous
at the thought of your palm
grazing against my thigh
like a two-day old balloon
making its way across the yard to the child
ready for every pop and pull.
Wild, hungry joy finds me finding
every way to laud a universe
that always provides
but that you only praise
when my soft fists become
the treehouse your father never built.
Tanto Tanto
come to me
open boneless
and full-bodied
like the octopus
I dreamt we waited for
while the sun set
octopuses live fast
and die young
can we
use all three of our hearts
be as pragmatic
as blue-blooded
did you know the female
makes love
like we do
eager and always
with the threat
of cannibalism
before I scare you
with any more
cephalopod facts
come to me
like the final tide
like the moon is full
of more light
than our bodies
could hold
Fado for Fiancée
Had I followed my foremothers’ manual
I would have already ironed and hung
your clothes, fridge fully stocked with meat and cheese,
your favorite deodorant in bulk on the bottom
of our linen closet. I’d watch news on my laptop
and let you have the living room, leave you
to your rom-coms and Grey’s Anatomy.
But I burned that handbook way back
in middle school, used the ashes
for my first tattoos. In this life, I will never be
a proper Portuguese wife.
Only the stray with a compass for a heart,
the smile by a well peeling an orange.
What you are marrying is an odd cutter
of cucumbers; a load starter-and-leave-it-
overnighter; hairpins in the corners of the sofa
and I guarantee I will lose your other sock
every time. I’ll fill our Netflix queue
with horrible horror movies, your ears
with so much high rambling during a documentary
you’ll seek refuge in our basement,
next to the clean underwear and bath towels
you put to wash, you folded perfectly.
What you are committing to is a lifetime
of what’s for dinner no I don’t want that
and my crying at the drop of a dime when I think
of Rocky and Adrian, this wallflower
you will always drag to the dancefloor
to secretly sweat your moves, this addict
who will choose you over any street drug
at the start of every morning, this imperfect lover
with fireworks for pelvic bones
this sandwich-eater who loves your sandwiches
the way young girls do the Jonas Brothers
this poet who is all rainbow and inside the lines
when you find me with your mouth,
saddle and slide until I am all glitter and verb,
this pug-lover who will flood your feed with
pug memes in hopes you’ll one day change
your mind about dogs and I pray this be enough—
the badly cut salad and haphazard hamper
the tired steam engine pulling into your station
this nightstand full of books and empty bottles
this fado we call ours, this coming-of-love,
our very own manual, and if so, I vow
to never give up on us the way the couple
in The Notebook never did, I vow to point out
how problematic this movie is every time
you watch it, vow to always find a solution
to our problems, vow to love you the way
our grandmothers’ wished for us, vow to write it all down
for when I am no longer a moment but a memoir