Crow Blue by Adriana Lisboa

chama? Quando é que você me ama? Onde é que eu vou lhe falar? Como é que você não me diz quando é que você me faz feliz? Onde é que vamos morar? (What is your name? When will you love me? Where will I talk to you? Why won’t you tell me when you are going to make me happy? Where are we going to live?)
    Chico wasn’t going to sing the song, tone-deaf as he was, but he could think it, since thoughts don’t go off-key.
    He could think it as he thought about Manuela. As he caught Manuela in a hug. Come here, girl. And she laughed. I thought I was going to die. How silly. (Who said “how silly,” him or her?) I really like you too. (This was definitely him.)
    That dense forest that blocked everything, that even blocked the sunlight. Once Chico dreamed that he was entering the forest and it was pitch-black. He couldn’t see a thing. In the middle of the day. But the forest is our second mother ! And in the middle of the forest you can hug and kiss someone you like, someone you think you really like, a lot, and sing songs mentally so as not to run the risk of going off-key. And later you can even sing a few lines of the song out loud, despite your voice and tone deafness. Just a few lines. Remove your clothes and reveal a body that is weak and strong at the same time. Ugly and beautiful. Very thin. Times two. A lot of insect bites. Calluses. Scars. Warmth, desire. All of it. Then put your clothes back on, hoist the firewood onto your back and take it to where it needs to be taken. As if it were weapons. As if it were a wounded companion.
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    One day I discovered a poem called “The Fish.” It was pretty difficult. It was in one of those (pretty difficult) anthologies of American poetry that the librarian gave me to read, full of literary honesty and belief in the future. And which I read thinking that it was all going to be transferred to my brain, lodge there and make me a different person (better, if possible: I worked hard at it and had a sponsor), just as the TV had taught me other basic survival techniques.
    A few years later, having reread the poem called “The Fish” many more times, the axis of my feelings shifting a little more with each reading, I decided it was my favorite. My Poem. Of all of the ones I’d sweated over in the pages of the anthologies in Denver Public Library.
    I discovered that the author, Marianne, was the daughter of an engineer-inventor by the fine name of John Milton Moore (I’d like to be called John Milton Moore if I were a man. Evangelina Moore doesn’t work, but Marianne Moore does. That is the name of the author of my favorite poem and it is a lovely name). Her father was committed to an institution for the mentally ill before she was born. I didn’t find anything about her mother; she was just John’s wife and was named, quite appropriately, Mary. Marianne liked boxing and baseball.
    When I read the “The Fish,” I was transported to a world of colors, of primordial movements. It contained crabs like green lilies and submarine toadstools.
    And a turquoise sea of bodies. And crow-blue shells.
    And a “sun split like spun” that was nice to repeat over and over, bringing with it an image of submerged shards of sunlight, shafts of sunlight. SUN SPLIT LIKE SPUN SUN SPLIT LIKE SPUN SUN SPLIT LIKE SPUN. Sun split like spun glass.
    It had nothing to do with the studies by scientists at the University of Edinburgh revealing that fish can feel pain [citation required]. Not least because it was written well before them.
    It also had nothing to do with the operations conducted by the Brazilian Armed Forces on the banks of the Araguaia River.
    Those were other fish. The woman who wrote “The Fish” was dying when the Armed Forces trailed their dragnets for subversives through the Brazilian Amazon. And she had nothing to do with it. Just as no fish had anything to do with it. The story that was