The trilling lifts me from sleep like heavy red curtains on opening night, except it is already day, and I’m making coffee. The sunlight grafts my window with glorious light and I want to drop down to my knees, hallelujah the shit out of this life before the kids and wife wake, before the news breaks like a chestnut with tales of new bombs and old systems, before social media reminds me Mercury will soon retrograde and Amerika is still racist as fuck, killing her black babies. I want to pluck each sparrow from the locust tree in my front yard and swallow them,

for there’s nothing a
lonely body loves than
a little morning song.

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Marina Carreira is a queer Luso-American writer and multimedia artist from Newark, NJ. She is the author of “Save the Bathwater” (Get Fresh Books, 2018) and “I Sing to That Bird Knowing It Won’t Sing Back” (Finishing Line Press, 2017). She has work featured in Queen Mob’s Teahouse, Paterson Literary Review, The Acentos Review, Pittsburgh Poetry Review, Green Mountain Review, Hinchas de Poesia, wildness journal, and Harpoon Review. Marina is a recipient of the Sundress Academy for the Arts Summer 2021 Residency fellowship. As a visual artist, she has exhibited her work at Morris Museum, ArtFront Galleries, West Orange Arts Council, Monmouth University Center for the Arts, and Living Incubator Performance Space {LIPS} in the Gateway Project Spaces in Newark, NJ. She is founding member of “Brick City Collective”, a Newark-based multicultural, multimedia group working for social change through the arts. You can find her on Twitter at @maketheunknown and IG at @savethebathwater.