ambitious hope, this heart that hangs upside down
in my ribs, blind and nocturnal and a glutton for fruit.
In a past life, I drowned with a rattlesnake wrapped
around my ankle. In another one, I danced for
a father’s obedience. In this one, I throw a rope over
a ceiling beam and let it dangle over my bed. Its abiding
creak rocks me to sleep where John the Baptist comes
for me with a basilisk on his shoulders, calls me
by my maiden name, and says: You have been weighed
and measured and found wanting stilettos and a lipstick
named Prima Donna. It’s not true, I try to say,
but each letter carves itself into a tree and holds
its blackness like a mirror. I see myself in every word,
only younger. I wake as libidinous and sincere
as Caruso in the morning lamenting his lost horse
on a Victrola. The rope above my bed is gone
and John the Baptist’s head sits on my chest
like a wish seeking entrance to a well. Where is she?
I ask, turning his head over in my hands three times.
He opens his mouth to let down the flood.
The Last Known Sighting of the Mapinguari
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
