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.