We rehearse our lines to each other as we palm mangoes to test
their tenderness and say, Não, comandante, and More rum, cadela.
Day in, day out, we eat the same fried bread and ripe plantains,
wash the same sheets, keep saving the saved, the baptized rising
from the river, awed and dripping, living their scripts. Though
our memories of the execution differ we stand on our marks
and clap. We try to recall our exact order in the funeral parade.
Extras in our own story and envious of the ingenue’s unmuddied shoes
and air-conditioned hotel room, we say, ajudar, ajudar, and cry on cue.
Between scenes an actor shares imported cigars with the prostitute
playing the missionary’s wife, and when cameras roll, he bites
her nipples with his prosthetic teeth. After the mayor hangs himself
and bequeaths his second-best bed to his horse, we write romantic
obituaries for his widow and send her signed photographs of ourselves.
We make love to avoid sweeping the sidewalk, to practice geometry,
to satisfy the voyeur and come with uncertain pleasure. Only when
the film crew leaves do the dead reappear, drinking, dancing, whipping
each other with TV antennas. They burn with more heat than light.
Pictures from that night reveal a black horse dragging a priest
through paradise, the crowd weeping, at last, with happiness.
contributor
contributor
Traci Brimhall is the author of three collections of poetry: Saudade (Copper Canyon Press), Our Lady of the Ruins (W. W. Norton), and Rookery (Southern Illinois University Press). Her next collection, a hybrid of essays and poems, Come the Slumberless to the Land of Nod, was published by Copper Canyon Press in March 2020. Her poems have recently appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, The Nation, and The Best American Poetry series. She’s received a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship and is currently an associate professor of creative writing at Kansas State University.
