JULES ET JIM, 2005
Did you do it? He was teasing, but
my hands were blushed rust in dye
and I guess it looked
bad or looked–– how boyish
of him to grin when someone
was dead only 500 feet
from the house where we lined bottles,
brown glass shoulders, neck to neck,
to suck ourselves in and maybe
chip a tooth, bleed it out till the morning.
When she was found and no one knew
anything, I searched
for what I had missed like maybe
an ex-lover, frothed at the chops, except
here was Paul, the ex
who had those photos of
her body sunk in a tub
and here was me, covered
in koolaid, looking bloodlust,
looking the Red Queen, about what
could not be uttered because
we could only fuck
that summer as if we could get closer
to her small hands in winter, the impression
of a leaf, how she talked of Beowulf
like a dog she once owned. She called you
chubby once, he had said and I hated you,
but you were dead and how could I, with you,
all butchered up, underground in White Plains?
What would I have said. Hey, we’re screwing
and sorry and what day is it and anyways
it’s always from behind, I never actually
look at into his tepid eye
(the left), his blue face.
LISBON
A sprawling elm hides all the men
who kiss in secret above the deep
bellied reservoirs; they know underneath
is a drop straight to the underworld, a wood
and steel well hiding all those roman gods
chained to the ocean pools of Portugal.
I pass the shopcats, leering
in their doorways, stately guardians
in a mangy hunch and down by the river,
the fisherman laugh when I get wet
from a passing ship’s aggressive wake.
The did not warn me. And they know
the sea here. But they could
not resist the pleasure of seeing
a young woman flustered and wet,
my jeans and purse and long black hair smell
like the Tagus the whole walk home
and they chuckle
with their bait, cast again, wait
for a Norwegian girl to take
my same seat
on the riverbank. On the walk
home, I thought of
your tanned wrists and what
your hands were doing
at that exact moment. I bought
figs and okra and imagined
each of them sliced
in your mouth, the lacy impression
they might make on its roof, your gums
a little art gallery
and envy of all the deco
around these parts. You would
have sat with me teasing
those shopcats, we’d do
nothing but write them poems,
give them royal ancestry, make them
monarchs of certain travessas.
One night, in fact, I passed
the travessa d’esperança and caught
the sounds on my tongue. A boy
smiled, told me in English,
that in Portuguese,
esperar does not
only mean to hope,
but to wait.
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MEGAN FERNANDES is a poet and academic. She received her PhD in English at the University of California, Santa Barbara and holds an MFA in poetry from Boston University. She is the author of two poetry chapbooks: Organ Speech (Corrupt Press) and Some Citrus Makes Me Blue (Dancing Girl Press). She has been published or has work forthcoming in the Boston Review, Guernica, Memorious, Rattle, Black Lawrence Press, Redivider, Postmodern Culture, and the California Journal of Poetics. Her first full length book of poetry is The Kingdom and After. Currently, she is a Visiting Scholar in the Department of English at Concordia University in Montreal.
