Saudade - Traci Brimhall

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      Before she died, my mother told me

      I’d make the monster that would kill me,

      but what crawled toward me was not

      my lost daughter manifesting as myth —

      this was someone else’s death creeping

      through my field, butchering my cow.

      I recognized its lone eye and two mouths.

      Perhaps it mistook the lowing for the call

      of its own kind. I didn’t mind the heifer,

      but her calf circled, refusing to leave even

      as the creature pulled out its mother’s tongue,

      fed one of its mouths and moaned

      from the other. The intestines glowed

      dully in the moonlight. The calf bawled.

      The disappointed mapinguari sat,

      thousands of worms rising from the split

      heart it held, testing the strange night air.

      I’ve outlived all the miracles that came for me.

      My mother was wrong and not wrong,

      like the calf who approached the monster

      and licked the blood from its fingers.

      The Unconfirmed Miracles at Puraquequara

      First came reports of a leprous child who touched

      the shrunken hand and was healed. A barren

      woman pressed it to her womb and conceived.

      Other claims followed — a manioc crop flourished

      when a farmer danced the hand over his field,

      a priest cast out a possessed boy’s demon when

      he used a finger to make the sign of the cross

      on the boy’s body. Whenever a believer paraded it

      down church aisles, the square holes in Christ’s wrists

      closed. The man who discovered the shrunken fist

      in the mouth of a dead jaguar said his manhood

      doubled in size. I knew where it had come from,

      this message that my daughter’s body was still alive

      and surely growing, but I said nothing. The town

      had waited so long for a miracle, and it was finally

      here, enriching the poor, emboldening the meek,

      carving acrostic mysteries into the trees. So when

      I caught it trying to escape the reliquary, I thought

      I had no choice but to leash it to the altar. That’s when

      the manioc crop molded and the woman delivered

      a stillbirth with flippers for feet and eyes

      like small black planets. Demons returned to the boy.

      He shook so hard he struck his head on a rock and died.

      When the hunter went mad and strangled his wife, the whole

      town was relieved. We knew what to do. We paraded him

      to the city square where he wept — Where’s my wife? —

      as the priest prayed — Deliver us — and we all shouted —

      Thief! — until his body stopped swaying and we cut

      off his hands. Startled pigeons roosting on the church

      roof took flight when they heard the clapping.

      To Survive the Revolution

      I, too, love the devil. He comes to my bed

      all wrath and blessing and, wearing

      my husband’s beard, whispers, Tell me who

      you suspect. He fools me the same way every time,

      but never punishes me the same way twice.

      I don’t remember who I give him but he says

      I have the instinct for red. Kiss red. Pleasure red.

      Red of the ripe guaraná, of the jaguar’s eyes

      when it stalks the village at night. Red as the child

      I birthed that my husband buried without me.

      The stump of flesh where the head should be,

      red. Pierced side of a disappointing Christ, red.

      A sinner needs her sin, and mine is beloved.

      Mine returns with skin under his fingernails,

      an ice cube on his tongue, and covers my face

      with a hymnal. I never ask for a miracle,

      only strength enough to bear his weight.

      Each day, I hang laundry on the line, dodge

      every shadow. Each night he crawls

      through the window, I pay with a name.

      The God I don’t believe in saves me anyway.

      In Which the Chorus Describes Cafuné on the Eve of the Passion

      MARIA HELENA

      The night in costumes, in church bells, in pews sucking on free salted caramels.

      MARIA THEREZA

      In the general’s breath before he pinches the child’s jaw open and spits in her mouth.

      MARIA HELENA

      We did nothing to stop it. Why would we? We only witness, record, recite.

      MARIA THEREZA

      Besides, no one else tried to stop history from bringing itself to the stage. Everyone fantasized a different present.

      MARIA DE LOURDES

      In the pews, the unrepentant traced their hands onto hymnal pages. Behind the curtain, the toothless, the leprous, burying themselves in scherzos and nude boas.

      MARIA THEREZA

      Jesus makes it onstage but forgets his lines, the new Passion simmers in the journalist, the priest, the poet, watching the dictator’s parade from an unlit room, composing meager epics and running the planchette across the letters written on the wall:

      MARIA MADALENA

       Will we survive?

      MARIA APARECIDA

       Of course not.

      MARIA MADALENA

       Will the country?

      MARIA APARECIDA

       Ask again later.

      MARIA MADALENA

       Is God’s love absolute?

      MARIA APARECIDA

       Nana, nenê.

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