Cape Verdean Blues Read online

  HOW TO END THINGS WELL

  So what if someone finds you in a bathroom

  kissing an archaeologist like you’ve just met.

  Minimize his body into your body of work.

  Hop off. Mid-ride.

  Make a list of other things you can choke on:

  candle wax, eucalyptus, string lights.

  Eat so much you start to become the thing:

  candle wax, eucalyptus, string lights.

  Make a list of things you wouldn’t buy.

  Clothespins. Drape yourself over yourself over

  the archaeologist who’s a rapper who asked

  if you carry lotion in your purse.

  AN EMAIL RECOVERED FROM TRASH

  Oct. 5, 2:14 p.m. Re: Home Swap

  Somewhere a woman’s lease is up. Two numbers on speed dial: Boston’s best hospital for bullets and a real estate agent who aced his license exam, gels his hair. The firm is neutral for us to discuss. The woman calls him looking for a four-bedroom apartment. To keep from laughing before the joke hits, he quietly gags on his breath as he says, I know just from her name that she has Section 8. His candle quartz skin burns pink with delight. We are never together for too long.

  He’s nothing like you. Not brown, not a creative. This story to say: I pray for you on the toilet every morning. I ask that you are lurking on my Instagram daily. A hole in my heart for the nights I made PowerPoint presentations of your body. My little discoveries. You take your shirt off now. Mostly, I ask that you thank me now and then and that you remember your face is a home.

  Hey, don’t make this about race.

  I know black men who gel their hair because it’s what keeps them together. This bit to say, I’m not sure I know how to fuck someone who is not afraid for his life.

  Am I a millennial or am I dead.

  I pray you’re creating. Someone different. Can you tell from my name, I’m still in search of a place to stay? I’m creating too, an aching homemade exit with reaction holes.

  SELF ON THE FIRST DATE

  You need the sun if you want to stop

  fast action. The sun wins every single time.

  The way it stands above you like everything

  is going as planned, as thought. How it shines

  on pregnant women on broken bikes

  and bones, on unplanned pregnancies.

  I’m sweating underneath the same purple pleated skirt

  I got hit by a car in, or collided with a car in

  or the sun opened its mouth

  blew me to the ground in.

  It looks different tonight.

  Some kind of photo grid meant to be read

  from right to left,

  and I keep telling the story of being hit by a car

  because I can’t remember

  if the driver had his blinker on. I couldn’t stop

  then I fell on my left side. In the street

  so close to where I work,

  a pregnant woman stops to ask if I’m okay.

  The shape of her stomach from the concrete.

  A coffee mug.

  This is what comes to me in a dream: a huge belly

  by an old dentist husband who is expecting

  with his new lover. Going to appointments alone

  walking around the office without a ring on.

  There has to be a poem in looking this good

  then dying on a bike. No helmet but a purple

  pleated skirt. Sometimes at the light, my thick

  thighs wear my shorts and men beep.

  Photography is not about moments.

  The rule of thirds makes a perfect sunset.

  The worst time to take a photo is in the

  middle of the day. I don’t carry mace.

  The first thing you touch at the bar is my hair.

  What you unearth you name volume. You

  are named after a saint who carried a sword.

  The second thing you touch is my lips.

  I want to take a photo of you. All directives come

  together. Fill the frame let the subject dominate

  the image. Get as close as you possibly can.

  The third thing you touch is a complex area

  named by Natacha in high school. Chichos.

  You reference conflicts in the Middle East.

  There’s no time for spot metering. Your eyes

  are moving too fast, you’re casting all the light

  even when you describe me as full of hope, labeling

  everything as up and coming as on the rise

  as getting there. I’m ignorant to international

  conflict. I started in the womb with my own.

  Mostly unaware but I know disturbance. Bullet wounds

  in Beirut. Bullet wounds in Boston. Your sword

  is in the way you stare with openness.

  Men don’t share where I’m from.

  I feel your knuckles as if I know how a surgeon’s knuckles

  should knead. I think they’re soft.

  You show me every spot where they are not. I want

  to lick the redness until I see a boy on the train ride home

  staring out the window. His father wants to know

  if there’s anything good out there. Horrible

  he whispers, but he doesn’t turn his curly head.

  THIS WON’T MAKE SENSE IN ENGLISH

  kanala v. travel; walk; get out of the house

  I told my uncle I forgive him then I walked to the dance floor

  LIBERATION

  I count gulls until they spasm

  into numbers, until I grasp

  a number never uttered. I ration

  dignity like crackers to last

  when my own words pan

  dust into the mouth of a little gull.

  I am a cracker to the plan.

  Little gulls are black and full.

  Little girls are running around

  in pink two pieces. I call for cover,

  an unspecific temp job, brown

  as the wanting of erasure.

  On the last day of work,

  my boss said being black

  is a box for checking. I smirked

  and danced my hips inside the square.

  Little gulls feed me not.

  I like beaches, and I like counting

  until I reach a number rot-

  ten with plans. I’m just lounging

  on a beach chair waiting

  for the girls’ laughter as the gulls hang

  like check marks. Boxing black slang.

  My noise so liberating

  it asks to be no one.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  My warmest gratitude to the journals and editors for publishing versions of this work:

  A Bad Penny Review, Atlas Review, Awl, Boston Mayor’s Office of Arts and Culture, Colorado Review, Mass Poetry, Minnesota Review, No Tokens Journal, PANK, Rhino, some mark made, Sundog Lit, Virginia Quarterly Review.

  One time for the readers of letsjusteatcheese.

  To my parents, Roberta Taylor, Luisa Barbosa, Irlando Barbosa, thank you for carrying me, feeding me, for giving me this warm, strange light.

  To my siblings India Taylor, Kyla Barbosa, Aina Lott, Malick Barros, Nisaiah Barbosa—thank you for the constant reminder that everything I do is to and for y’all.

  Thamani Tomlin Norton, thank you for allowing me to sit on top of your washing machine.

  Bob Morales, I am working out my issues. By my 200th birthday, I will be perfect. I will also probably be in a jar.

  Adriana Cloud, Michalla DaSilva, Nakita Barros, Joey and Zane Barbosa, Caron Taylor, Damon Coleman, Denise DePina Dubuisson, Waverly Coleman, Amanda Barros, Courtney Villón, Tania DeBarros, Leah Veaudry, Telma Tavares, Jenny Tavares, Nicole Vengrove Soffer, Sydney Brown, Sue Rainsford, and Laura Gill; thank you for your tremendous love, encouragement, and support, thank you for the listening, reading, dancing, eating, wine, whiskey, words, memes, pray
ers, cards, crystals, candles, sage, patience—thank you for watering my plants. Thank you for showing me what it means to feel at home in the world.

  Special delivery kind of thanks to Joshua Bell, thank you for 9:17. Deepest appreciation to the faculty and students at the Bennington College MFA program. Thank you to Megan Mayhew-Bergman, Kathleen Graber, Ed Ochester, Gregory Pardlo, Major Jackson, Mark Wunderlich. My Rockport loves: Simeon Berry, Abigail Mumford, Heather Hughes, thank you. For the time and space to write, thank you to the Martha’s Vineyard Writing Residency and the Writers’ Room of Boston.

  To everyone who’s ever said keep going,

  keep going.