Giving Out

Abstract

Giving Out Marie J. Carvalho (bio) 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 (bio) Marie J. Carvalho 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. Copyright © 2006 The Curators of the University of Missouri Coplas/Verses Marie J. Carvalho (bio) Marie J. Carvalho 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. Copyright © 2006 The Curators of the University of Missouri Damage Marie J. Carvalho (bio) Marie J. Carvalho 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. Copyright © 2006 The Curators of the University of Missouri Marie J. Carvalho 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. Copyright...