Cotton Xenomorph is a literary journal produced with the mission to showcase written and visual art while reducing language of oppression in our community. We are dedicated to uplifting new and established voices while engaging in thoughtful conversation around social justice.

Lunulae

by Carla Sofia Ferreira

Navigators make maps

   by the light of

            little moons,

                        crescent moons.

 

     The visible part

of the nail’s root

appears at 14 weeks

            as little moons,

our fingertips already

            beginning to hold

light.

 

     Girls in Rome

wore amulets

     of little amber

moons to protect

            against

the evil eye,

   an eye a pair of

close(d)

   parentheses.

 

   Erasmus coined

the term lunula

   to refer to the rounded

parenthesis,

            recalling the curve

     of crescent

                        moons.

 

The dark of

   a crescent moon

is only

   what we cannot

see of its

             light.

 

             Sometimes we

do not see what lies

     in gaps,

the words we choose

            to place between

                        parentheses.

 

Crescent moons

            alight on a path of

    parentheses,

a map,

            a root,

an eye,

            a coin,

by calling them by name:

                        we see the gaps.

(           ).


Carla Sofia Ferreira is a high school teacher from Newark, New Jersey and the daughter of Portuguese immigrants. Author of the microchap, Ironbound Fados (Ghost City Press, 2019), she holds fellowships from the Sundress Academy for the Arts and Rad(ical) DreamYard Poetry Consortium. Her poems and book reviews live in communities such as underblong, Glass - Poets Resist, The Rumpus, Marías at Sampaguitas, and The Denver Quarterly. Ferreira's most recent project was coediting No Tender Fences, an online anthology of immigrant and first-generation American poetry, out now to raise funds for RAICES - TEXAS.

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