We carry the bride’s coffin on our backs, hastily constructed by our frail hands from what was once her litter. The starving season is a killer, even for brides brought from afar to marry kings and princes, dowries of gold and spices carried with them through the streets of hollow wasting faces. The bride’s hand maidens walk ahead of us, adorned in white, the color of weddings in their country, but to us, it has always been the color of mourning, the color of death, the color of the snow that comes to take our children. We step in tandem, careful not to drop the corpse, even as the air itself turns bitter and blue in the cold, and still yet we walk northward, to where tears freeze as you weep, and your heart stutters, for the air is fractal.…
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Via del Corso, 111 Centro Storico,
4 giugno 2005.
My apologies, wherever you are.
in that small square off Via del Corso,
I photographed your argument,
filled the lens with you
standing on your toes,
leaning into him.
your lips pucker, as if you’d kiss,
but I can feel those wounded words
and watch the hands mimic every utterance:
pinched fingers point in the air;
a flick of the chin; ma va’ là!
basta!
the words and every gesture
become a dance all your own.
more than once you take two steps back, turn
and then return
to continue with such passion, such intimacy,
the sun slips behind heaven’s white clouds
and a light grey veils the day.
while others continue on premeditated paths,
perform circadian chores
or simply go about their business,
I watch you walk away, disappear,
vanish in a crowd that’s unaware
of all the music in the air. …
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The time will come when Earth wobbles so fiercely that overcompensation is impossible. Notice its placement, its tilting, its hanging in there, just there, without a way to know it’s going to stay there securely for a few million years before the sun swells up beyond its present state and renders the Second Coming a moot point. Unless that will be the Second Coming, an inferno that makes Satan’s playground mere child’s play. A blistering nugget singed beyond recognition. Encompassing flames, heat, molten rock. All things melting into the air, the sky. Souls as blemish-free as a sleek new tablecloth – an afterthought along with everything else. No more thought will be left to hang our coats on when it gets too stuffy to move.…
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You gotta get a good rock. A big one. But not huge. Come down the hill to the end of our grass. There. An “X” marks the spot — we’ve got lotsa rocks around it. It’s not an “X” really, but mommy says the place is “precious,” so it’s kinda like treasure. So you grab one rock. It’s smooth, fits in your hand, and it’s not too heavy.
We need paint. Come up the hill to my house. Shh! Mommy’s being quiet in her chair. We can get some nail polish off the dresser in her room. It’s a kind of paint. Mommy won’t mind. She doesn’t see me when it’s her quiet time. Look, here’s a good red one beside the picture frame. The photo’s kinda old.…
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My daughter has a lot of demands when I want her to go to bed. She’s supposed to be in bed at eight, but I usually don’t fall asleep until after midnight. I give her enough attention during the day; you’d think she’d be tired enough to fall asleep when she should. But no.
I put her down at eight, but she asks me for a glass of water at eight-twenty. It has to be a clean glass, and it has to have the right amount of water. If I don’t do it right, she gets cranky.
At eight fifty-two, she’ll ask me to read her a story from the leather-bound tome on the stand in the corner. It has lots of stories, but she only wants to hear the same one.…
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It appears meager,
this knapsack of provisions
to sustain me as I venture into
your desert
but you know how thirsty
I get in the heat
and how small reversals
cause me to lose heart.
A blue mirage distorts a dune
into a faraway figure – perhaps it’s you.
I brush sand from my eyes.
It is not certain we will find
our way across.
An oasis of palms
may offer the promise of shade
or a feast for vultures.
– Dayle Olson…
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It was almost two am. I was in the common room of my college dorm, reading The Story of a New Name, the second book in Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan series. It was Saturday; I had given up a night of partying and fun with friends to sit alone and read. Three of my friends came in and I was so engrossed in the book that I didn’t notice until they were a foot away from me. Two of them were visibly tipsy, eyes narrowed by tiredness. K leaned in and hugged me, relaxing all her body weight onto my shoulders, limbs loosening into sleep.
“Okay let’s go” the other two said and hoisted K up from me.
“Get high with that yet?” one of them says, looking at the battered copy lying in my lap.…
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