Giovanna

I.

On a Yugoslavian farm,

she was born at dawn.

The oxen puffed and steamed nearby.

Crying, she stretched into the straw.

She was fifth

behind four brothers.

At nine,

she asked them

how babies were born.

They laughed roughly

as they slaughtered the dinner hens

and milked the cow.

At nineteen,

as she served breakfast,

Mussolini paraded by

and the boys ran in the road

to see who could touch

his passing car.

At twenty-nine,

she bailed hay,

milked the cow, and plowed the land

by hand, wondering when the Italian Navy

would allow her husband a leave.

She wondered and cried as she knelt

in the dirt.

At thirty-nine,

she was torn from his shirt

as stoic soldiers in green suits

took the men to labor camps.

She carried grain

fifty miles

to feed her sons.

One morning, while eating shoe leather

in broth,

she turned forty-nine,

and the bombs exploded around her

like broken hearts.

When her boys weren’t witnessing

executions behind thin shrubbery,

she read to them.

II.

In a misty port,

she arrived at dawn.

Crying, she undertook America.

In an Italian deli in West New York,

she was five thousand miles

behind her brothers.

At fifty-nine, she asked God,

“How come?”

She laughed roughly as she

swatted the mice out of her

crammed pantry

and sent her grandchildren

to overstock it more.

At sixty-nine,

as she served breakfast,

her faithful transistor radio buzzed

Carter’s pleas about the gas

while the boys ran in the street

among parked cars.

One morning,

while eating anisette toast with

black coffee,

she turned seventy-nine,

and when her sons

weren’t hiding from their torments,

they read to her.

III.

At eighty-nine,

she lay dying in a New Jersey hospital.

I arrived at dawn.

Crying, she stretched her arm towards mine.

She said, on a Yugoslavian farm,

she was fifth

behind four brothers –

names and faces she no longer knew.

She asked me

how babies were born.

I looked at her,

drew in a determined breath,

and laughed roughly

to make her feel at home.

Di

She died at the worst time:

at the height of love, beauty,

celebrity. Wearing fur

to funerals while despairing

with musicians, making

childbirth chic – I always

wanted to live like this. She

got that stroke of odd luck,

making history for marrying

a royal asshole – getting

a personal astrologer and

beautician for her trouble.

There were days she looked so sad –

Yet so demure – in a pretty pink suit

and matching pillbox hat,

you could only love her

stylish sulking all the more.

During my divorce, I wanted

to die – didn’t stand a chance

of being glamorous about it.

There was no staff to say,

“You go girl,” or to adorn

my aching anima with the right

cream taffeta gown, no

matching shoes for the heavy-footed

underdog I was that year.

So when she went, all my hopes

for losing gracefully

went too, and I swear

I almost bought a ticket

to Britain just so I could

add a bouquet of red roses

to the piles mounting

at her mansion, just to get

closer to the country her corpse

was in – if someone from TV

got me on camera, crying

while placing my flowers down,

Di would have been

a plausible part of me –

and maybe I wouldn’t have to die

knowing that misfortune

is, in fact, unfashionable.

One Jesus

Before September 11^th,

a mother only had

one Jesus in her heart: He

who blessed her with a son –

not the one who could

allow one sunny morning

to be the backdrop for the end

of her child’s life.

She couldn’t help herself –

her disbelieving cries, her

failed attempts to avoid looking

at Jesus differently.

she remembered the One

who looked in on her

when she bode her time

between an ideal

and an unborn child,

when all she could do

was thank Him. Look

at my baby’s fingers, his

pursed lips, cellophane eyelids,

fingers gripping a trembling

hand, his pure breath.

The wonder never waned.

Those fragile fingers

turned to strong hands; little legs

to a soccer player’s strong legacy.

Her greatest joy was his

kindness. So it made no sense,

it couldn’t be that Jesus

she thought she knew, when

this investment banker

turned to ash in an instant

at the hands of someone

a world away.

That one Jesus

was only there for the birth,

she bitterly mourned. Jesus

would have honored those years,

the wiped tears and the skinned

knees and all the diapers and

lost sleep and lessons taught and

lessons learned. That first step,

that first school day, that

first girl who chased him

into the woods for a kiss. No –

that one Jesus wasn’t there

for this. A wrinkled, graying,

ragged mother hated this

Jesus who she couldn’t

understand, who stole her

son who had become such

a good man. She hated

the very idea of her beloved

son sacrificed in the

Thirld World War: she

thought hard at Jesus:

the one she exalted

as her beautiful boy lay in her

unsteady arms 31 years ago,

and the one from September 11^th,

who laid her son down

in unsteady buildings.

Patterns

They seemed to agree

there was something special

about their celibacy. It seemed

more spiritual, like when they

read together, he’d quietly

hand her a section of the

Times. Or when they’d shower,

and wash each other’s backs.

It went from insatiable licking

to licking the envelopes

of holiday and thank-you

cards; a deeper understanding

of need. They could count

on eachother to listen,

about things such as

people not comprehending

trees; only last year,

Joyce Kilmer’s came down

in Mahwah for an A&P!

They talked about starting a

petition, invented agendas: Alanon

Wednesdays at 7:00, hypnotherapy

on Fridays – to change their patterns.

They were open to each other

about everything – as long

as they concentrated on

growing, together, everything

would naturally fall.

They began to read more,

and fill each other in

on what they’d learned. This

is what marriage is,

and they knew it.

The Boy who Survived Hitler

Croatia, 1944

Dread occurred like an impulsive current as he played on the proch of his grandfather’s farmhouse. As if awakened from a dream, he looked up and squinted through the sun at the green mountains above the townlet. The hills were moving: up and over and down the peaks and valleys of his youth came the soldiers. They swarmed toward him, little boy, wide-eyed, mussed hair, barefoot in the dust.

“Wasser! Wasser!” They demanded, and since from his grandparents the boy knew some German, he ran inside to fetch their water. The look on his face as he swung into the kitchen was all his grandmother needed to see. Her hands gripped a vase and trembled as she filled it with water.

The soldiers drank in gulps as the water ran down their necks, the froth from their mouths bubbling over the rims of the cups. Their large guns clinked against their belts as the water darkened their uniforms to an even deeper green. The boy waited, blinking, while the swarms moved into the village, burning houses and hanging the neighbors. Uncle Pepito, who only moments before had been pulling weeds in front of his house, swayed from the large oak tree in his yard as if from heaven – puppeted by a yellow rope around his neck, face still in the conundrum of how to kill the weeds below him.

Larger, fair-skinned boys were automatically taken from their homes and put into the Army. Any sick or crippled were shot immediately. There was no time to think. The boy’s cousin, who was visiting from next door, had a permanent limp from playing with a grenade when he was three. Now four, and fearing the soldiers, he stumbled silently into the folds of his grandmother’s skirt as the soldiers stormed into the house.

The little cousin clung to his grandmother’s leg under the dark gray cloth, thinking of it as a theater curtain. She reacted suddenly and briskly, serving the soldiers fresh borscht and cheese; she moved efficiently through her kitchen as if serving just another meal; she waited on them as she spoke German as hospitably and as stealthily as if it were her native tongue.

Sweat formed in patches on her large, white thighs, then dripped as she worked: salty rivulets streamed from her waist – small deadly cascades challenging the little cousin’s grip. He regrouped, digging his nails into her with all his strength as she shuffled from stove to table with no misstep, her voice confident and cordial as she bent to lay bread on the table, her brother swaying outside her window.

The little cousin clutched hard in her dark folds during the soldiers’ long reprieve. Her legs shaped his hands, the smell of her girdle snaps; her salty, wet legs, and the dense smell of her vagina were his life. There in her safety he heard the screaming surrounding the meal – men, women, babies, horses, rabbits, hogs. They all sounded the same.

Nothing would ever attract the senses again for the little cousin. He became a continual bystander to days like these, over and over until finally he merely existed as a witness, undone, unravelling into a certain bleary-eyed wisdom. He became a man who carried a looming omnipresence, bestowing tales of survival onto those he loved like terrible trophies.

Jersey Girl

My little bird, you

were conceived in Lake Tahoe and born in New York State –

anything to associate you far from the smoke-

stacks of New Jersey. I remember being ripe

and bursting, determined to leave my home

and birth you in a place that I could say I loved.

But you will always be a Jersey Girl. You love

what you know, and what you

will know is a home

so much different from mine. The state

of my birth and my life is ripe

with disappointments and smoke

screens set totally apart from you. When the smoke

clears, you realize that it’s not a place you hate or love,

it’s what you met with and where, and why, that ripens

into a truth about who you are and why you

were chosen by us. New Jersey is the state

where we adore you, make your home

a shrine for your mind, a haven for your heart – your home

will be remembered as the place where smoke

rises at dawn off the Pochuck Mountains, the state

where Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass grew, the love

of books, scattered on the floors of every room you

enter – in our little home in the Vernon hills, ripe

with the smell of Evergreen, of lavender, ripe

with the scent of roses brought home

by your adoring father, never missing a chance to love you –

something I never had from mine. Your home has smoke-

colored wolverines in the woods beyond our windows – your love

of New Jersey will be about your state

of mind, of time, of knowing the state

of bliss we were in when we first held your tiny body, unripe

and unknowing into this vast world, our sea of love

rushing impossibly into our modest home.

You may leave and journey away, you will see the smoke

rising above the traffic in Athens, you

will see the state of deterioration in every city you’d like to call home –

you will be ripe with always wanting more, and you will scale a smoking