Giving Out
Rent from DeepDyve- Giving Out
Waikiki is a wash: coconut oil foaming in the unclean bay, fans blowing in empty chapels along the strip, drug pushers, voodoo & Chinese apothecary, children working the back alleys, eight-dollar Big Macs, somewhere a love turned salt & the bellow of an elephant from the zoo. Every year I bring myself back like the misplaced tourists, not belonging so thoroughly in their nylon aloha shirts. I bring myself back to bet my fortune alongside theirs, to offer what I have to my dead. I'm in the marketplace on Kaläkaua Ave & it's not yet noon, but the man sitting alone at a café table has half a drink, one straw, two umbrellas. I wear a silk dress stained the color of crushed poppies, suck a maraschino cherry, track a woman with a broken heel struggling down the beach, her single shoe filling & unfilling with sand. I'm remembering that afternoon when I was still barely as tall as the bar, & I watched from a restaurant while boys searched the thin strand for men to take them home. Then, the flush as a drink was sent my way—a Shirley Temple— my new breasts hardening for the first time under a gaze. What did I know? I thought then that my body would take me somewhere beyond airport parking lots, fumbling in the rain [End Page 108] for keys that weren't mine, or the strange rooms where I found myself on carpet in damp circles of burgundy, trying to sleep as threesomes & foursomes fucked, their toes dazzlingly indistinguishable. Pawn shops, jazz & someone else's husband, jobs, rivers & streets I have loved & abandoned as if they had not become me, as if I had something left to give. This morning, the thin hours found me at Kāney'ohe cemetery, where I placed the long stalks of red torch ginger on my dead grandmother's grave. It was a paltry offering & she knew it, told me so in Portuguese. Each time I return, the clay in these hills is redder than before, & those horses that used to run in the shadow of the mountain & more distant. Why is it that I remember words I never knew, that I can hear my dead ask, Do you still remember this street, do you know the way?
- That Thing You Can Never Have
Marie J. Carvalho studied art at Pomona College and creative writing at the University of Oregon, where she earned an MFA and a Starlin Award in poetry. She has received an INTRO award, a Wyoming Arts Council Fellowship, a Pushcart Prize nomination and a Ford Foundation Fellowship in sociology. She currently resides in Honolulu, Hawai’i, and works as a freelance writer.
- Coplas/Verses
Marie J. Carvalho studied art at Pomona College and creative writing at the University of Oregon, where she earned an MFA and a Starlin Award in poetry. She has received an INTRO award, a Wyoming Arts Council Fellowship, a Pushcart Prize nomination and a Ford Foundation Fellowship in sociology. She currently resides in Honolulu, Hawai’i, and works as a freelance writer.
- Damage
Marie J. Carvalho studied art at Pomona College and creative writing at the University of Oregon, where she earned an MFA and a Starlin Award in poetry. She has received an INTRO award, a Wyoming Arts Council Fellowship, a Pushcart Prize nomination and a Ford Foundation Fellowship in sociology. She currently resides in Honolulu, Hawai’i, and works as a freelance writer.
Marie J. Carvalho studied art at Pomona College and creative writing at the University of Oregon, where she earned an MFA and a Starlin Award in poetry. She has received an INTRO award, a Wyoming Arts Council Fellowship, a Pushcart Prize nomination and a Ford Foundation Fellowship in sociology. She currently resides in Honolulu, Hawai’i, and works as a freelance writer.
