Michelle Reale is the author of several poetry and flash collections, including Season of Subtraction (Bordighera Press, 2019) and Blood Memory (Idea Press), and In the Year of Hurricane Agnes (Alien Buddha Press). She is the Founding and Managing Editor for both OVUNQUE SIAMO: New Italian-American Writing and The Red Fern Review. She teaches poetry in the MFA program at Arcadia University.
I keep my distance from the old widow in black polyester and wool, a string bag hanging on her arm. She squints at the sun with milky eyes. She is an old spell caster. Her children were never born though they remain bloated and moaning, within her. One red thread runs through her black, gathered skirt. She is the embodiment of unspoken and unfulfilled desires come to roost. The ancient cobble stone retains a heat that rises through my feet, but I am grateful that my legs can still take me where I want to go. I move from her line of sight. On Via Vecchia, the vacant eyes of the pleasure seekers are glazed with a wanton desire that frightens me. The sea pulls them forth with its own incantations. I have been the victim of intensity masked as good intentions. In a way, I, too, am a widow, staking a claim to something already gone that gives me my persistent identity, something lost along the narrow way. Misfortune is catching. Proximity to it is the danger we entertain unaware, while sipping our milky coffee out of rimless cups and picking at our meals. The rind of lemon curls in the sun and we smell its fragrance everywhere. The evening is a menace that stays up late. I see the outline of the widow through her threadbare curtain and it awakens a latent memory in me that is best forgotten. She lights a candle, and her blue veined hands hover over the small flame. I am buffeted by revulsion and desire for a life that is anywhere, anywhere but here. The decay is palpable. I can hear drunken revelers far from home. I see children eating gelato, and young lovers smoking in the desultory ways that only they can. The rumble of the sea is no match for its extreme blue under a sky that we can still count on. Someone breaks a glass. The candle is extinguished. At night, the sky we thought we knew is devoid of stars, but I gave up reading signs long ago. My mother with her inherited superstition warned me to never let the dead kiss me in a dream and yet, I purse my lips when opportunity presents itself. I stumble, for sure, but I still find my way home, kissed by salt air, guided by a generational imperative as native to me as the bright yellow lemons abundant and tart.
Poetry in this post: © Michelle Reale
Published with the permission of Michelle Reale