Dead Things and Where to Put Them
So much to bury. So much lifelessness
carried in the pit of your belly, the bulge
of your back, the calluses of your feet.
The bird that flew into the window weeks
before your firstborn wailed into the world.
That midnight between the dark pines
and my waist and his hands. The white
currant bushes dried up by the fires.
Yellowed notebooks and fallen teeth.
The seahorses scooped out of the Atlantic,
The kit in the crow’s mouth two winters ago.
The kittens Avo tossed into a bag and threw
behind the shed. The onion-domed house,
the white and blue house, the chicken coop.
Your rosary, your bata, your body.
Dead things, and where to put them
if not in the ground, the damp earth where
all things return, right next to the graves
of my matriarchs whose homes are now
rubble along the roads I’d walk in the summers
of my youth, hands shielding eyes
from the unbearable light and dust of dusk.
Marina Carreira (she/her/hers) is a queer Luso-American writer and multimedia artist from Newark, New Jersey. 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). Marina is a recipient of the Sundress Academy for the Arts Summer 2021 Residency fellowship and a finalist in the Platypus Press Broken River Prize 2020. As a visual artist, she has exhibited her work at Morris Museum, ArtFront Galleries, West Orange Arts Council, Monmouth University Center for the Arts, and Living Incubator Performance Space {LIPS} in the Gateway Project Spaces in Newark, New Jersey. Follow her on Instagram at @savethebathwater