Animals: Three Poems by Marina Carreira

Wolf Moon in Quarantine 

I’m the one howling at you   
tonight. Howling in sorrow,   

in angst, in vain and solidarity   
with all other mad women   

cooped up for too long   
in their mortgaged houses,  

in their tired bodies,   
in their half-lit half the time  

heads. Snapping at the  
forced air, snarling every time  

someone asks about dinner.  
I’ve never been more wild   

in domesticity, baring my teeth   
at boredom, scratching at walls   

for release. Oh to be a cur   
in the dark embrace of woods,   

to run miles and miles away  
from sound and screen,  

to crown myself with violets
after preying, bloody mouth   

a headlight in the wind.  
Blame it on the patriarchy,   

blame it on the pandemic,   
blame it on the moon,  

full and spreading herself 
rabidly over us as I watch  

at the window. For fuck’s sake,  
can’t women and wolves  

do that too, live fat and feral 
without having to die trying?   

It Is a Serious Thing Just To Be Alive 

after Mary Oliver and Brigit Pegeen Kelly 

Take the goat. Raised as playmate to a girl, 
Illiterate, oldest of seven. They cross field 
after field, day after day, in search of 

small wonders under the hot sun. Neither  
the goat nor the child know what is to come,  
that the bright joy between them is not meant  

to last. It is a serious thing just to be alive,  
to hold life in your arms, stroke it and smell it  
and breathe it and feel the head call to the heart,  

tell it there is no sweeter thing. The heart dies  
of this sweetness. Months later, the goat  
is slaughtered for a Sunday meal. The girl sits  

at the table, hands wrung, hums a song she sang  
to the animal days before. A bleating,  
a bleeding, a jingle in the air, years after.  

Requiem for Love at the End of The World 

after Marc Chagall’s Les Amantes au ciel rouge, 1950 

Let’s pack for everywhere tonight; 
Make prom of the apocalypse— 
scorching dancefield where goats roam  

from the dinner table, children bouquet 
their grandmothers’ bones, widows sing  
like sparrows lost at sea—die a little death  

with me on this pyre of poppy and yarrow;  
let’s be the pulp people feast on, the marrow  
of love staining them in Revelation. 

About Marina Carreira

Marina Carreira (she/her/hers) is a queer socialist Luso-American poet artist from Newark, NJ. She is the author of tantotanto (Cavankerry Press, forthcoming 2022), Save the Bathwater (Get Fresh Books, 2018) and I Sing to That Bird Knowing It Won’t Sing Back (Finishing Line Press, 2017). She has exhibited her art at Morris Museum, ArtFront Galleries, West Orange Arts Council, Monmouth University Center for the Arts, among others. Her work investigates identity as it relates to gender, urban, queer, and bicultural first-generation spaces. Keep up with her at hellomarinacarreira.com.