My Poetry Corner June 2023 features the poem “For Your Hypocrisy With a Kiss” (Pra Sua Hipocrisia Com Um Beijo) by Brazilian poet, photographer, historian, and teacher Elisangela Martins, who self-identifies as Eli Macuxi or Elimacuxi. She teaches History and Art Criticism in the Visual Arts Course at the Federal University of Roraima with special interest in feminism and gender identity/orientation. As a historian and photographer, she has partnered with the Association of Transvestites and Transexuals of Roraima in fighting for human rights.

Born in 1973 in the City of São Paulo, she grew up in a favela on the periphery where, for the first ten years of her life, she faced hunger and begged on the streets. Her semi-illiterate father, from the Northeastern State of Ceará, taught her to read and write. With a childhood fascination for verse and encouraged by a teacher, she began writing poetry in fifth grade. At fifteen, she dreamed of having her work read and studied by others:

“But the desire was totally blunted by the pessimistic awareness of reality,” confides the poet on her blog. “I was a skinny teenager, without luck of getting a job, studying at night school on the periphery, ‘daughter of a drunkie,’ with lots of younger siblings. To be a writer? Poet? It was laughable.”

In 1990, as a seventeen-year-old night school student and receptionist at a pharmacy during the day, she married a much older man. Giving birth to triplets soon after did not bode well for their marriage. Before the triplet’s second birthday, her husband had had enough and left them. A divorcee and back home with her parents, she worked for two years at several part-time jobs before securing a steady job as a waitress at a high-end restaurant.