The Arava Review

In the Hotel Das Cataratas two inches of green tongued bugs
filled the lights that hung quietly from the ceiling;

the cold bath never keeping us cool as the hot air crackled over the
whoosh of the falls that we would listen to all night long,

and you made up all the legends that you could never find: the piranha
swimming under your nude skin, you on all fours, your mouth spitting
out from the heat of the dark jungle;

in the dark, your eyes turned into the eyes of panthers,

but you would still make me sleep out in the hallway, where I had to sing
Se Essa Rua Fosse Minha to make you fall asleep.

Then that morning I found you lying there naked on the bed,
your right leg pushed all the way up to your breasts, your long hair
silently covering over your face—the panther in you gone.

I covered you with the sheet and closed the door behind me; I realized
that all your bones and dreams had already crushed inward.

Fourteen years go by until one day when I catch your ghost spying
on me like it always would; what did you always say?

The Serra do Mar spreads across the triple border,
down where you once were, the haunted place where you
brought your soul to rest from all its days.

Wet, scarred, cut up, your insides spilled right out, you and Naipí
floating over the waterfalls like the white braids of twenty ghosts.

Over on the Garganta del Diablo I always looked for you out
over the valley,

the Iguazu snaking through the forests the way you and God
had a way of snaking through my veins.

Jeanpaul Ferro

What name,

after rolling it over on our tongues,

will unleash itself

in a prep-school christening?

Let’s just think of things that smell,

or rhyme, are found on the body,

or could end in “y”: Gatty and Gitty, Gats and Gitties, were all good,

not great.

Some ended in “o,” but even that didn’t work—

Gatos? No.

It was difficult to brand Gates, like no one ever had

or would before, which I guess

made him lucky

or maybe just

bad with luck,

since if nothing fit

it was actually the worst way to go.

Ryan Tate

A groomer of wigs knows certain tricks.
A laundress knows of a lake that washes blood
from a prayer shawl.
A blind man
can remember precisely
the roads of his boyhood, the tilted face
of the last girl he saw leaning toward him.

In the unvisited lanes so many are waiting.

What have you learned
between music and the gray winter rain?

Yehoshua November

Yehoshua November’s poetry has appeared in The Sun, Margie, Provincentown Arts, Adirondack Review and others.  His work has received Prairie Schooner’s Bernice Slote Award and was selected as a finalist for the Autumn House Poetry Prize and the Tampa Review Prize for Poetry.  His first collection of poems, God’s Optimism, won the 2010 Main Street Rag Poetry Book Award and will be available from Main Street Rag in August: www.mainstreetrag.com.  He can be reached at yehoshuanovember@yahoo.com