Seven Contemporary Italian Poets (5/7)
BY Linh Dinh
Florinda Fusco, translated by Laura Modigliani:
0.1
I count the bones now that you are almost close enough
behind the glass pane the hand pushes but does not reach
the body bent over to embroider a forest with pins
steady, so as not to prick oneself
wrinkles grow on the skin like roots, trees
little by little I chop off my fingers
my tongue the other tongue
covered with moss
all the way to the throat
put a sky in my navel and I will give you all my
slumber
the bones interlaced with iron threads the weight of the flesh
pressed on the earth the hair grown into needles
examine the body splayed its imperceptible movements the foot light as
air
I will not open my mouth of concrete
to say to you
come back later, it is always too soon
they told me the dead are present at the ceremonies
they arrive on time they are always behind you
the women wear big hats and long blue gloves
they carry necklaces of white beads inviolable like rosaries
you don’t notice their light step
you don’t smell their scent among
the guests
you don’t see their bare foot on the
marble
the dead walk on the earth
they mingle in the hair
slide down the neck, between
the ribs, in the veins, all the way to
the nails of the foot
the day they alight on the glaze of
the plates
or in the bottom of glasses
in silence we drink them
trunks of veins grow over me cross me
in the house there are neither stones nor bones
to form into toys
I loosen my braids to make a blanket to cover me
I play by myself plant nails into the earth
wait for the tree of the resurrected
0.5
an ermine struck at the center
of my forehead under the swollen skin
a trickle of blood drips down the body to the feet
as I embroider the skin held inside a frame
the canvases ooze
faces of ancestors surface from the backs of paintings
they stare at me they answer questions with questions and don’t ask for
answers
they tell me of a fragment of sky under the foot or
in the empty glass of my felt blindfold stretched across my eyes
they do not make appointments so as not to meet me they do not read me
their stopped watches they do not invite me to the banquet of the
absentees
I measure the chest, the cavity,
the depth of the scratch, the cracks of memory
I lay down my crowns of the queen of lost memory
there is no gauze for my carpet of blood
..................................................................................................................
Laura Modigliani lives in Brooklyn, NY. Her poems have appeared in such journals as MiPOesias, Promethean, sic, The One Three Eight, Poetry in Performance, and The Blue Jew Yorker, and her translations have appeared in Fascicle. She was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2007 and 2008. She received the Malinche Prize for Literary Translation in 2007 and the Jack Zucker Memorial Prize in Poetry in 2005 from The City College of New York, where she received an MFA degree in Poetry. She works as an Associate Editor at Weekly Reader Publishing.
Linh Dinh was born in Saigon, Vietnam in 1963, came to the U.S. in 1975, and has also lived in Italy...
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