April 16th
by Ann Pedone
Arrived late last night: Hotel Mercurio I am red: I stink of heat In this city:none of the girls are allowed outside E鈥檛utto finito Reason produces sleep: but sleep produces no reason At the cafe across the square, a young man came up to me said that during the Middle Ages the priests here would burn coffee to conceal the smell of death :but I am deathless Ezra Pound invaded Italy. Ended up at St. Elizabeth鈥檚 Hospital, room 224: nothing was ever explained to him: slept every night on a pillow made of numbers and goat hair. When he returned to Italy: died under a blanket of suns That was the last step in an unnatural descent: not a way to alleviate sorrow just the origin of memory at least the version told by the Greeks Last night my husband sat on the floor: cross- legged like a school girl I lay in bed eating fat rendered from the dead: my body warm under the sheets This is Venice: a city that follows the rules of misdirection: like a woman who doesn鈥檛 know what to do with all of her holes. I have spent the last four years standing in a stranger鈥檚 doorway enjoying the resistance then the sirens stopped the air smelled like mild surprise. The women of the market have told me: in cases like mine, any god will do.
Ann is the author of The Medea Notebooks (spring, 2023 Etruscan Press), and The Italian Professor鈥檚 Wife (spring, 2022 Press 53), as well as the chapbooks The Bird Happened, perhaps there is a sky we don鈥檛 know: a re-imagining of sappho, Everywhere You Put Your Mouth, and DREAM/WORK. Her work has recently appeared in The American Journal of Poetry, Narrative, Chicago Quarterly Review, Carve Magazine, and Juked. Ann has a degree in English from Bard College and an MA in Chinese Language and Literature from UC Berkeley.