By Ananda Lima
Seven American Sentences
In the beginning
were people
who lived here
before.
In the beginning
of spring, spirits
hovering over the waters.
The vault
evening, morning, sky
the second
day after a shooting.
Body: let it serve
as a sign to mark
times, and days and years.
Correction:
George Washington’s teeth
were never made of wood.
In the beginning
of the end
missing
signal for lane change.
And on the seventh day
same thing again
only some
rested.
(first appeared in the Birmingham Poetry Review)
Minute
What is inside red?
What is inside green?
What is inside me?
What is Earth?
Is Earth in grandma’s house?
What is a minute?
Are minutes for cooking?
Is the daytime nighttime
for the moon?
ARROYO
— “Triste Bahia” —
They say the first
letter of my name evolved
from a picture of a
carcass
a cabeça de vaca
sem as suas costelas
expostas like claws
or jaws ancient
my
neighbor says not to
let my son sleep
on my bed but I do
I
know the terror
at night we’re haunted
by my great great great
grand-
parents dry on cracked
soil beating in the cold
of my feet na Bahia in the
bones
they inhabit on my bed
In America, I learned
that arroyos are
paths
carved by the rain
but I already knew
at
night the cracked soil
calls for me, as
cabeças
de vaca of my greats
calling and calling
I
tell them I don’t
know you, but I
do
_______________________
the city’s spine
is a split bifurcation
solidified in calcium
in
America they
eat the bagasse of
oranges and say my
name
means bliss I am
in love with bone white
concrete, the spine of the
city
sits fleshless and free
of scales flexible bones
that can bend and bend
and
keep bending and keep
bending and bending
bending right up until they
snap
After Nathaniel Mackey
and Caetano Veloso
(first published in jubilat – not available online)
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Ananda Lima is the author of the poetry collection Mother/land (October 15, 2021; Black Lawrence Press), which is the winner of the Hudson Prize. Her work has appeared or is upcoming in The American Poetry Review, Poets.org, Kenyon Review Online, Gulf Coast, Jubilat, The Common, Poet Lore, and elsewhere. She is also the author of the chapbooks Translation (Paper Nautilus, 2019, winner of the 2018 Vella Chapbook Prize), Tropicália (Newfound, forthcoming, winner of the 2020 Newfound Prose Prize) and Amblyopia (forthcoming, Bull City Press – INCH micro-chapbook series). She earned an MA in Linguistics from UCLA and an MFA in Creative Writing in Fiction from Rutgers University, Newark. You can visit her online at AnandaLima.com.
Mother/land, winner of the 2020 Hudson Prize, is focused on the intersection of motherhood and immigration and its effects on a speaker’s relationship to place, others and self. It investigates the mutual and compounding complications of these two shifts in identity while examining legacy, history, ancestry, land, home, and language. The collection is heavily focused on the latter, including formal experimentation with hybridity and polyvocality, combining English and Portuguese, interrogating translation and transforming traditional repeating poetic forms. These poems from the perspective of an immigrant mother of an American child create a complex picture of the beauty, danger and parental love the speaker finds and the legacy she brings to her reluctant new motherland.
