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.
MARIA DE LOURDES
The night is ripping its dress to bind soldiers’ wounds. It’s painting the church with the blood on the torturer’s floor.
MARIA HELENA
It’s nailing together the gallows.
MARIA THEREZA
It’s combing men’s hair with its fingers, singing, o nenê dorme no
chão, and measuring their necks.
Beg, Borrow, Steal
They fingerprint the severed left hand
at the police station and all the officers
start carrying prostheses in their pockets
in case they discover my daughter alive
but handless. Everyone makes a spare —
the carpenter whittles one, the dressmaker
stitches one, the coroner pickles one
and experiments with electricity and leeches.
All of us plant offerings to lure her home —
tattered bassinet, puppet theater in a mannequin’s
hollowed chest, a suit of armor posed midstride
as though some uncanny conquistador resurrected
himself and continued his search for El Dorado.
I plaster walls with pictureless posters — MISSING:
my reason for living. Last seen: pink as life and wailing.
Tourists return from their searches shouting
premeditated epiphanies, claiming they found proof
of life and the postscript of a ransom note requesting
old opera records, or else. My tongue inside the licked
envelope, detective and clue. I barter for what
remains of her, ignore the warning in the first half
of the ransom — All action leads to suffering. So does all hope.
At dawn I find not my daughter, not her other hand,
but a word as light as terror parting the trees.
Seven Guesses
My daughter is dead or being raised by a jamboree of jaguars
with her dress pulled over her head, pretending to be the ghost
of a blind king, or my husband will bring her body back from
where he hid it and parade her on the back of a white-eyed mule,
or
