Cape Verdean Blues Read online

  PITT POETRY SERIES

  Ed Ochester, Editor

  CAPE VERDEAN BLUES

  SHAUNA BARBOSA

  UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH PRESS

  Published by the University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, Pa., 15260

  Copyright © 2018, Shauna Barbosa

  All rights reserved

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  Printed on acid-free paper

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  ISBN 13: 978-0-8229-6521-3

  ISBN 10: 0-8229-6521-6

  Cover photograph: Ataraxia by Warren Keelan

  Cover design by Alex Wolfe

  ISBN-13: 978-0-8229-8329-3 (electronic)

  For Robert Morales

  I know you love me. You know I love you.

  CONTENTS

  Let

  Strology Gemini

  Small Town & Terrifying

  Don’t Leave Your Smart Phone at Home

  Every Year Trying to Get My Body Right

  Taking Over for the ’99 and the 2000

  Strology Cancer

  The Genetics of Leaving

  Making Sense of What We’re Made For

  To the Brothers of Cesária Évora

  Girl

  This Won’t Make Sense in English lénsu-marra

  Broke

  How’s It Goin’ Down

  Deniz

  I’m Not Drunk; I Have Only Swallowed a Bone!

  Strology Scorpio

  When I Say I Want a Baby, You Say You Miss Me That Much Too

  This Won’t Make Sense in English gudjadu

  Self-Proclaimed Sad Boy

  re the dentist and his new family

  Welcome Back

  Strology Virgo

  Foreign Summer Remembered in Traffic

  Strology Aries

  Tone’s Posture

  Flush Past the Ferry

  Strology Sagittarius

  Something African with a K

  Great General of Impossible Battles

  Somewhere There’s a Baby on the Line

  This Won’t Make Sense in English pasada

  Strology Leo

  Big Sun Coming Strong through the Motel Blinds

  GPS

  This Won’t Make Sense in English banhâ, banhera, banhóka, banhu, banu

  Strology Taurus

  There’s Something So Deeply Gratifying about Welcoming Your Mother into Your Home and Offering Her a Meal as Nourishment and Thanks

  And I Know That She Feels Beautiful—Do We Have Cancer

  Strology Aquarius

  31-Year-Old Lover

  Simone

  Your Eyes Blink Five-Minute Miles

  Strology Pisces

  You Will, Indeed, Always Be the Same Person after Vacation

  After Finding a Hair in My Food at Roxbury’s First Gentrified Café

  Strology Capricorn

  Blossom

  Not Crazy Just Afraid to Ask

  Strology Libra

  How to End Things Well

  An Email Recovered from Trash

  Self on the First Date

  This Won’t Make Sense in English kanala

  Liberation

  Acknowledgments

  LET

  my father be a pregnant palm.

  Or Cesária Évora’s voice

  on Christmas with Sodade on her lips.

  Let him be Amilcar Cabral’s fist in the air.

  And the pardon for all the stints

  the sun fixed on his baby girl.

  Let him be an instrument

  in a jazz song: trombone, bass, and snare.

  The ship carrying his brothers and sisters.

  If rain falls on the land he can’t live on,

  let him be a wildflower there.

  Be a dancer, be a volcano with good intentions.

  Be thousands of drums shipped to Cape Verde.

  The cell phones, the shirts, and the shoes inside.

  Let the sky be my father on his knees.

  Let the sun be my father.

  When the blues melt the sun,

  let me be the words he holds tight.

  STROLOGY GEMINI

  This week will be like the week your mother disappeared, and your now dead uncle taught you multiplayer solitaire. Bet the money you saved in high school that you will hear the chains falling. Break every chain, the gospel. Commit to thinking in terms outside of your bones. They move. Then they don’t. Your insides twerk, up and down, back and forth. Gemini, this week is the accent you have, but refuse to use. It’s time to move through life with your head open. Your solitude will roll down the street smoking, using language as a thing with which to shoot. Your throat will feel like a drain. Hair hugging metal. Forget about unclogging; go on with your days. Hide your face from children when crying in public. Your one good uncle will die as you dance on top a table. If you look directly into the sun, document the day anger (your mother) took your hand and did a crazy thing—held it.

  SMALL TOWN & TERRIFYING

  If I listen to the news tonight, I won’t come.

  On mute the television anchor exchange sounds

  like, Do you remember what you used to do.

  Looks like, Do you remember what we did to you.

  I think the lady anchor’s saying, I’m the only

  taste you can describe without referring to notes,

  my scent, the way home without roads. Man

  anchor thinks she needs a new city dipped in holy

  overcast, daily drama, and daily migraines

  false remedied with vinegar, washcloth, cold water.

  If I unmute, I could unfocus the idea of private

  property. In Santo Antão, when a landowner’s

  animal wanders into or destroys the garden

  of her neighbor, the owner of the garden seeks

  punishment. I await penalty on his lap.

  In Boston, everybody’s plan out is to flip houses.

  I’ll pay for the part of my elaborate pretending,

  but there’s no faking, I prefer my eggs over easy

  I just can’t make them easy for myself.

  DON’T LEAVE YOUR SMART PHONE AT HOME

  It had not occurred

  to me to hit record

  on vacation. I lugged

  thirteen extra pounds

  best explained as delirium.

  Could not record,

  the waves is technology,

  is experience. My

  experience did not occur.

  Fury so gorgeous

  I knelt on my sun &

  carpet burned knees

  in awe like the dream

  where a guy is being stabbed.

  In front of a crowd,

  bearing witness.

  EVERY YEAR TRYING TO GET MY BODY RIGHT

  Frenchmen Street in your pickup truck with the broken rearview and the door I can’t open from inside. What’s better than New Orleans car smell, scraped toes hanging out the passenger side. I keep the window open in the event I need to summer language my mouth into prayer. A gallon of water, two crawfish sandwiches, twelve years between us. I’ve got that one good one: God is grace, God is good. Let us thank you for our food. A man I ate before you said, I’m sick and tired of you overfeeding yourself. For breakfast, I used to put my weight into scrubbing the stove. I stay lathered up. I stay far away from home. These languid seconds waiting for you to release me disguised as every year I’ve spent trying to get my body right. I’m in Brazil now, choking on humid desire, armed with another good one: What doesn’t move, flies. Amen.

  TAKING OVER FOR THE ’99 & THE 2000

  Embraced only by fire hydrants

  our preteen lives

&nb
sp; how we knew them: the girls got boys,

  the boys got money.

  Peace to the faces

  of boys who have now been shot dead.

  Others deported to the warmer climates

  of Praia, of Fogo.

  Peace to the gorgeous good hair girls

  now birthing boys texting boys and

  phones and

  de-viced or devised, we’re all online thinking,

  Who the fuck can throw a better looking

  baby shower than me?

  Uploading took over the 2000’s

  children of immigrants taking the best

  parts of being unparented in Roxbury

  and making them worst.

  STROLOGY CANCER

  Quiet the dead are these days, yeah? For the watchmaking Cancers, at the end of the month, watch her get a manicure. How her four fingers caress the back of the manicurist’s hand while her thumb is being shaped into a coffin. Count that embrace: count on your fingers, count in your head. Count eight clocks, they don’t talk back. The clocks will keep working. Cancer keep working. Keep time. Time don’t talk back. One clock says she will have your baby. Another sees you by the curtains listening to jazz in REM. The dead let light in; they use your terror. The universe wants you to stop throwing up. Three whiskeys, four hours, and later, you will find yourself over a monocle five minutes too long. For the watchmaking Cancers, at the end of the month, count eight clocks, count nine. Take a shot. With your ten fingers, tick her mouth; watch her two hands that won’t hold yours. Between the 14th and 18th, lie next to her, your lesser frame a lesson. The moon is a hammock. A hammock is a moon. Loosen up, Cancer. Lie down without moving, ask how she’s doing, and let the dead come.

  THE GENETICS OF LEAVING

  Inside, this vessel feels like the 1996 spelling bee when I forgot

  u in language. Vovo left Fogo

  to Praia. Now she has two sons named José.

  Islands apart, I already jelly fished every memory that’s stuck

  inside. Saltwater

  nostalgia stung, rinsed right up off me.

  Vovo left and came back, not recognizing my thirteen-year-old

  aunt, her new haircut

  resembling the first José. I contracted. I expanded.

  I pushed temporary waters behind me. I already forgot

  I’ve got two versions of my climb. The one I swam and, I—

  I only climbed this mountain to take a picture at the top,

  bell-shaped bodies all forgotten.

  All this bad luck because I split a pole.

  If I could open my mouth

  I’d ask my grandmother why

  she took so long to return to her first set of fish.

  I’d ask if she’s aware she has two sons named the same.

  She’s got two versions of herself,

  one in the land of a free, haircut, two, me.

  As soon as you start to love a city,

  a thick-bodied flight attendant touches your shoulder

  walking down the aisle. Thought that was affection.

  I took care of that part of myself in a complicated way.

  There’s only one temperature that’s good enough for a mother

  to bring back the u of this vessel that is no longer the you

  around my neck.

  MAKING SENSE OF WHAT WE’RE MADE FOR

  I like how the bottoms of my feet feel

  like silence. Can you exit my whorehouse,

  enter my empty? How the floor spits

  gunpowder, leaving its mark on coffins.

  I’ve a suspicion I was a little girl

  dab in the middle of dancing, bestowing

  rings and roses to mice in a crack house.

  Sodade.

  I hope you find you

  before I do.

  Sodade.

  They’ve taken a beating, my feet. I know

  you think pretty I’m bold, bold girls

  don’t die. I smile silence, shipwreck harsh

  seas. My hollers vibrate a sweet magic.

  I sweat violence like ceremony. Come

  closer and you can hear my legs like tires

  like grief in the wings of an eagle. Closer

  and

  Sodade.

  I made myself my mother.

  Then I made myself yours.

  TO THE BROTHERS OF CESÁRIA ÉVORA

  I’m at the jazz bar

  staring at the saxophonist

  looking for the entry wound.

  My curated movements

  are all pretend

  darkness don’t equal depth.

  He’s looking for mind, too.

  Me too is not the same

  as hang in there. All rhythm

  no blue like swinging

  arms are all form of measurement.

  The sax to body position, dead skin

  cells to household dust

  flying across the world

  doesn’t compare to noticing

  your only bookmark is a pair

  of scissors, to cut

  means leaving the big tune.

  No more pretend this place

  smells how it looks outside

  at dawn on September’s first

  fresh

  turning from hopeful to who

  can I talk to alive or six-feet under.

  Curated sendoff,

  one last wound tune

  for my brothers, all colors ranging

  bread, coffee, blood sausage, and

  gaslight. No one wants

  a black mouth brother

  I know, you don’t want to be

  cause it’s difficult to be

  black, and

  brown mouth with a hopeful open

  no more pretend not knowing

  that speaking Portuguese

  at the traffic stop

  won’t save you.

  GIRL

  What you went through gon’ cost you. For Sale: Body

  never tampered with. For Sale: Unwanted snow blower.

  Being consistently inconsistent. For Sale: Cell phone passwords.

  For Sale: Not your size graduation gown never worn.

  Sump pump & pipe. Those lazy expression

  lovers welcomed with a yes. For Sale: Weak lovers who spit

  without asking. For Sale: The ground they walk on.

  A rigid plumbing tool. Flannel belonging to the photographer

  met online. For Sale: The photographer’s wife’s website.

  Fainting couch. Discontinued NYX,

  wet n wild, Blast Off Burgundy lipstick by Posner.

  The boat grandfather arrived on. The house grandfather died in.

  For Sale: Artist condo to take photos of the flannel wearer.

  For Sale: Galvanized mop bucket. How you show up

  at the let out. For Sale: Gently used cloth diapers.

  For Sale: Bad vibe seeds guaranteed to grow good.

  For Sale: Certificate confirming Posedeia as sea-goddess.

  Faint water pressure. For Sale:

  Everything that broke you.

  THIS WON’T MAKE SENSE IN ENGLISH

  lénsu-marra n. scarf; headscarf

  I’ve worn this wig long enough this shit is mine raise your hand if you’re too tired to wrap your real hair at night raise your hand if you feel insecure about wrapping your hair in bed with anyone for the first time I am laughing at my future Instagram captions if I burn the palo santo he gifted me will it burn the body just added to my roster

  BROKE

  While I study my aunt makes a few bucks with no English at the Au Bon Pain in Harvard Square. She’s sweeping like it’s a Saturday morning in her Cape Verdean home. Don’t stop until the floor’s licked clean. Make your bed like you changed your bed. Today my aunt introduces her subrinha to the other Cape Verdean workers, who, young and old, are mostly cleaning or organizing the croissants. I smile over, a free Americano. It takes courage or will or common
sense or common courtesy or respect to dare a language not your own. When they ask me how I’m doing in broken English, I hurry toward class but today my aunt has my grandmother on her phone. Pamódi, pamódi, Vovo wants to know why I don’t visit. She’s yelling at me in Kriolu and I love how it sounds to be loved so fiercely in another language. I hear words I know and ones I don’t in the voice of the only woman who braided my hair, the only woman who held my hand in her baby-soft skin. I want to ask Vovo how she’s doing, but she doesn’t know any English. Across the room, one woman mistakenly teaches another to say, I miss you, have a good day.

  HOW'S IT GOIN’ DOWN

  When I moaned high,

  hissed, Deeper, what I meant

  was, say what you remember

  of your mother giving you up.

  I have gossip for you

  if you have gossip for me.

  When I text goodnight,

  I mean tell me again

  the me in this bar is

  worth losing sleep over.

  When I tell you I’m working

  on a vision

  what I mean is, bless no

  triggers in this family photo.

  When I say I’m at a local

  jazz club in awe

  like the unnamed brother

  in Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues”

  what I mean is,

  there exists no note without

  my name on it. When I tell you

  to put my name on it,

  you do. With a song you

  can’t pronounce, opaque

  o, pack, unpack our scars.

  We didn’t last a year.

  When I tell you I want to work

  things out what I mean is, I knew

  a man’s body before my own.

  Knew back pain before

  I looked back and eyed my own.

  The sax is killing it.

  The sax is where it’s going down,

  it’s how we hear the part, here

  where it all hurts, the part when

  it all hurts. I mean, the good part

  of the evening. The light feels like

  trick candles pleading to be relit,

  the ones making themselves

  wrong. Extinguished and