Category: Guest Authors

I still want to live as if every small thing mattered
all the time, even if I know nothing can be ours to keep.
~ Luisa A. Igloria

small things like purple ink in a squat bottle,
matching Piper fountain pen cradled in a
velvet-lined box with a white satin ribbon
to hold it in place, forty pages of designer paper
with prints of monarch butterflies,
pink peonies with mint green leaves,
a peacock, its tail unfurled, set against
a sheet of music, a sparrow on a doily,
hot air balloons about to kiss the Eiffel Tower

you’d think paper as precious as this
would carry the scent of jasmine or roses
but no, what it presents is more enduring
the gift of possibilities as it travels over
thickets of pine trees, rivers polluted with
single-use plastic, children playing hopscotch,
drunks stumbling home

believe in the humblest of things
they waken to dreams too

with all the evening music
great as a prayer
Dave Bonta, “Red-Lined“

I awake early on the Feast
of All Saints and take
my coffee to the porch.
Once I would have stayed
awake until this hour, wringing
all the celebration possible
out of our All Hallows Eve.
I say a prayer for all those departed,
the ones gone much too early from the party.

Once I would have lit the candles
and declared my love
of thin spaces. Now I fear the hunger
of ghosts who are not ready
to leave and the hooligans
who take advantage of the dark.

I touch the pumpkin’s crumpled face
collapsed from the candle’s heat.
I put the gourd on the pile
of tree limbs ripped from the body
of the tree canopy during September’s storm.
I hear one lone bird singing
either a prayer to greet
the morning or a lullaby before sleep.
I look to the sky, still dark,
no message in the stars.

The men were lithe, dark-eyed and curly-haired, stepped out
of a Roman mosaic, the women massive, with sea-green medusa hair
and soup-stained bosoms. An ancient, noble family used for centuries,
in their palazzo high above the Bay of Naples, to owning servants,
this new one a lost girl, spewed out from education
with no notion of who to be, still shaken by the death of a father
I didn’t love enough.
Yelled at for not understanding, you learn a language fast: sporco,
dirty, presto, hurry, you, now, no! No doubt about the no: no free time
except grudgingly on Sundays, no breakfast not even a cup of coffee
before washing dirty nappies, no sleep with a little one wailing all night
and who could blame him, plucked from his mother’s breast to be dumped
on this girl with a bottle and no clue. You learn fast, too, about babies,
even more about myself, all the love, patience and nurturance
I never knew were inside me.
And Napoli, encircling vision of grandeur, with its secrets,
poverty and crumbling art and the blue, blue bay to be seen from
every ivy-shaded window of the ducal mansion? Truly, I was too tired
to pay attention. Life narrowed to slow-motion endurance of routine,
the fog of longing for rest, grateful for the baby nodding off
or for a good meal – and meals, prepared by Lola the malevolent,
were huge: the sweating beef and luminous tomatoes, pasta piled
and steaming above sticky kitchen oilcloth.
So I grew a belly for the first time, watched it with growing dismay
but continued eating, even when the fat tubes hot with angry chillies
grew cold before I was allowed a moment to fall to. And once or twice,
on Sundays off, quick, groping sex in the woods or in the back of his car
with a man who looked a little like my dad, succumbing half-ashamed,
this too a way to feel my body, briefly know myself as less diminished,
more than foreign skivvy.
Now like a far-off dream, that season of cavernous apartments,
harpy voices and cowed failure to tell the dreaded duchess vaffanculo!
Only a tiny taste of servitude, never destined to last more than
a few months, but it left scars and, familiar to women everywhere
who care for other people’s babies, a bittersweet remembered love.
Forty years later I spell out the long, absurdly grandiose family names
and there he is – my bambino’s middle-aged face
on the Internet.

In response to Luisa A. Igloria: Help.

Vaffanculo = fuck off in Italian

we fall from hell
into a committee meeting
“Fall” by Dave Bonta

Before he goes to the department meeting, he watches
old nuclear war movies on the Internet. He fast
forwards to the moment of destruction:
mushroom clouds bloom in the background
as he prepares his notes.

During the meeting, she
finds comfort in the words
of John the Baptist. “I am not
the Messiah.” She repeats
this mantra as she tries
to think through the ramifications
of bad budget numbers.

I realize too late that I should not have listened
to punk music on my way to work.
I emerge from the meeting yearning
to be sedated. Instead, I make another binder
of documents that will yellow
into insignificance. I think of paperless
offices and other promises of a future
yet to arrive.

The tame, respectable, hard-working folk
that I grew up around were very quick
to spin a lurid tale or two and give
a little girl a night of troubled dreams:

the evil imp that lived behind my wardrobe
and the monster underneath my bed,
the people in white coats who’d come
and get me if I misbehaved again,

the agonising death that surely followed
swallowing a fingernail, the children
I should stay away from who would only
do me down and laugh behind my back,

the strangers I should never trust, also
the enemy within the family, the miserable,
undeserving poor, the patronising rich,
the cat that scratched, the dog that bit,

the endless, ill-paid, unappreciated work,
the misery, the cynicism, lack of hope…
surprising, really, but the worse things get
the surer I become that they were wrong,

that all these stories were the creatures
of a quiet but overwhelming bitterness
we don’t have to succumb to – there are
always other ways to meet the world.