MAMA ANA PAULA ALSO WRITES POETRY

Mama Ana Paula also writes poetry.

Corn-husk tobacco in mouth, she throws a thick poetry book

at me, “Read your Mama’s poems.”

This is true, my student José’s mother,

two Brazils on her chest, a South America on her bucks,

a stomach full of beer, surging like the Atlantic,

this Mama Ana Paula

writes poetry. The first day I met her, she lifted me

up like an eagle

catching a small chick, I wasn’t informed she writes poetry.

She spat at me her wet words, and rubbed my face

with her big palm-tree fingers. When she licked my panicked ears

with marijuana tongue, I didn’t know she writes poetry.

Everyone including her son José and daughter-in-law Gisele said

she was an old Flower Silly, but no one told me she writes poetry.

“Put my teacher down, my dear old Flower Silly,” José said.

She dropped me, but went on “dick, dick”, catching another chick.

I looked at her back, strong like a hairy bear that kills

a bull even when she’s drunk, and I understood she writes poetry.

But today, when I followed José into the house, and caught

a glimpse of her lying by the pool

with four limbs stretched out, smoking, I didn’t think she writes poetry.

I ran into a ponytail

like Bob Marley, a muscle guy, in the living room, Gisele told me

that’s her mother-in-law’s guy from last night, I wouldn’t think,

even if you would kill me, that Mama Ana Paula

writes poetry. But Mama Ana Mama Paula Writes Poetry, the Ana Paula

that burps and farts. I leafed through page after page of

Mama Ana Paula’s poetry book. Yes, Mama Ana Paula writes poetry

indeed. She doesn’t write fat poetry, liquor poetry,

marijuana poetry, dick poetry, or muscle poetry of muscle guys.

In a poem called “Three Seconds of Silence in Poetry”

she wrote: “Silence in a poem, give me three seconds and in it

I can spin the nine yards of sky.”