Brooms! Buckets! Açai! Mangos! Melons! Bootleg CDs!
Bikinis on mannequins that look like sex dolls dancing in open air.
The coconut man’s at his stand, grinding the flesh into piles of snow.
He asks me to marry him and as I consider,
an elderly couple trundles by with a load of root vegetables.
Their frayed plaid jackets match, their arms are wrapped around
each other’s waists. You could just tell she’d given birth
to several babies, now grown and living in distant parts of Brazil,
their photographs neatly arranged on a lace-covered table
in her living room. I follow them to the bus stop, cry
when I see him take her hand, then her net bag
as she negotiates the stairs of the Rua Catete No. 472
which disappears in a cloud of exhaust
on its way to what I imagine is a modest apartment
where she begins the long slow process
of slicing and boiling and mashing the manioc
to rid it of its bitterness and poison.
VOLUME 3: ISSUE 4
WINTER 2026
Poetry
“In Rio, After an Ill-Fated Romance”
Jeanne-Marie Osterman
Jeanne-Marie Osterman is the author of four collections of poetry, including Who Killed Marta Ugarte? (Broadstone Books), Shellback (Paloma Press), and All Animals Want the Same Things.She was a 2018 finalist for the Joy Harjo Poetry Prize. At home in New York City, Jeanne-Marie is poetry editor for Cagibi, a journal of poetry and prose.
