‘Fava Memories of a Kitchen Midwife’, ‘Carnaval on the Dunes of Ceara’ & ‘Water Lessons’

Zaheer Chaudhry. This visual artist, based between Dubai and Lahore, Pakistan, finds inspiration in the rich tapestry of culture and ever-changing weather of their birthplace, the ancient town of Ajudhan/Pakpattan, Punjab. Drawn to art from a young age, they pursued professional studies at the National College of Arts (NCA) in Lahore. Recognized for their talent, they were awarded the 'Golden Residency Visa' by the Culture and Art Authorities in Dubai in 2024. Their artistic practice is a diverse blend of mixed media art, Digital Art, contemporary photography, travel storytelling, TV, theatre and film art direction, site planning, and communication design.

Fava Memories of a Kitchen Midwife

Today I harvested our fava beans.
I slide my thumbnail down their seams.
Fold back their green wings to retrieve
the embryos nestled in that spongy white.
Slick skin slithers through my fingers
falls plinking to the colander below.
I am midwife at my kitchen table.
My daughters grown, their daughters grown.
My white hair dusted with tiny purple petals.
Before me, a mound of empty shells.

Gathering these, I remember the fazenda in Brazil
where I first saw fava beans. The farmer’s wife
who taught the one-room school there,
kept her husband’s books at his bodega,
raised their twenty children, mostly grown and gone,
tossed fava from her woven sieve like swirling birds
into the golden twilight beneath the shadow of a palm.
She watched her chaff be carried by the breeze, her reflection
so palpable I could enter it, as if we measured life in fava beans.
Was it worth it? Where had it gone?
Light-distant as stardust. Womb heavy.

Carnaval on the Dunes of Ceara’

It’s just the family
but the family a tribe of fifty
descended from Portuguese, Bantu, Tupinamba’ -
everyone but me a different shade of coffee.

It’s already Fat Tuesday on the veranda.
Our make-shift band in full swing: Ignacio on drums.
Seu Lino, under a bush of white hair, strums his cavaquinho
carved from armadillo shell. The guitar riffs, the agogo’ bongs
and the tin-can cuica squeaks, as elders croon to oldies.
Barefoot kids hook a caterpillar chain that kicks its thirty legs
in samba-sync as it weaves its way through revelers.

Uncle Ribamar’s big bronze belly flashes a gold medallion
as he swivels down to the patio floor with me, while maiden aunts swirl,
unleashed at last, hands in waves above their heads like palm fronds.
Tio Chico and Tio Liborio in a duel, seeing who can dance
the longest balancing a cup of beer upon his head.

The scent of feijoada rises from the kitchen where Dona Quinquinha
stirs black beans and ham hocks until another drunk uncle bursts in,
sashays her over the blue-tiled floor, laughter flowing back outside,
where fishermen’s kids now surround the porch in ragged shorts
and kick up feathery whirls of sand with spinning moves.

When night falls only the moon is still,
its gleaming eye silent and unblinking
over the rippling waves that dance backwards
towing our momentum
out to sea.

Water Lessons

Once as a child, naked by my tub,
I watched water gush from our faucet,
its steam fading my image in the mirror,
its thrust bubbling my bath with foam.
I marveled at its abundant glistening stream
that seemed an endless glow of silver light.

I wondered how this liquid,
hot for bath, cold for thirst,
obedient to each subtle twist of wrist,
how such a precious thing as water could be free?
What if we had to pay for it like milk that arrived
in bottles weekly at our door!

Of course, I did not know about my parent’s water bill.
I did not know this water came from high in the Sierras,
a valley named Hetch-Hetchy, a word for grass that fed the Miwok.
Did not know what it cost the Miwok to flood their valley,
robbed of home, community, their link to spirit world,
so this water could flow through pipes to fill my tub.

I knew my water came in pipes, but did not know that all
water does not come in pipes - how many women in the world
must carry water on their heads from wells and rivers
or make their living washing clothes along some muddy bank
where amoebas thrive and flukes from snails that sailed on slave ships
can make their urine bleed, their kidneys fail.

Later I learned how water is abused and must be treated.
How it is polluted, hoarded, stolen from the dispossessed.
How this war we’re funding now is fought for water and the gas it hides.
Water, not an endless flow, but finite like our planet. Like our life.
So much in childhood I did not know, yet even in unknowing
at that moment by my tub, watching water flow, I sensed its sanctity.

Ruth Mota currently resides in Santa Cruz, California after living a decade in Brazil and working as an international health trainer. Her poems often reflect her experiences in Latin America and Africa. Over fifty of her poems have been published in online and print journals including The Atlanta Review, Gyroscope Review, Duo, Terrapin Books and others.