Letters
By Lisa Marie Basile



(1994)

You are a sloth on me, and I am
your Cecropia tree.

                                    
(1995-1997)
 
Mostly it was the litany of light that kept me awake. There were
three great street lamps beyond the trees, beaming through midnight.

I spent two summers thinking that the leaves would catch on fire
while we slept. They would gallop toward
the yard, engulf our whole cul-de-sac in white, I knew it.

I drew plans for escape, my mother’s bed circled and starred.
I needed glasses. So did everyone.

We were still paying for Brian’s
funeral, for the feldgrau tear jars that never came.

When I went to the eye doctor and cried into the ophthalmic chair,
she just said as our heads were made for spectacles,
our hearts were designed for death.

(2000)

I’ve seen him before, with that Seneca mouth slouching toward hell.
The AA-meeting doorman with the God Pamphlet. I was only fourteen, but everyone
thought I was my mother’s sister: Little tits, porcelained.

It was the Chapel in the Ecuadorian section,
no longer holy, only filled with conchas y drogadictas y
my mother, that skinny bitch.


When my mother spoke at the podium I felt
a wide angel fly from her head, crack against the rafters
and fall to the floor.

She covered the place in wing.

I imagined myself bending over her, preparing her like a
butterfly jaggedly descending toward a calm death.

(2010)

Poppa was hanging the last of the crystal rosaries on the headboard
over Nonna, who used to flirt with the Black Shirts under lemon trees
in Palermo. In 1936, she was pregnant with her babies,
like my father, the babino da inferno who was born in
December. Inferno, inverno, the hell of winter.

She never loved him, and he never loved me.

The smell of death fills the penne in the kitchen,
her Body saying Don’t you bury me, stupido! I’ll bury myself.
Everyone always thought she was immortal. I guessed
all Sicilian women were.

I stood with a half-blooded Sicilian face, saying
goodbye to the dead. The last thing she said to me was
never be quiet. Yell at everyone who won’t love you.

I am like my mother, too sad to ever
make it past mourning without coming apart like
a Komondor dog, my heart wound up in long ribbons,
unraveling toward the floor as spindly, dying DNA.

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