Original Prompt 2, Week 5

“She makes birds dip and cluster in a flame/ tree, heavy with bushels of orange blossoms,/ makes the green spikes of yucca, its white/ bell torches, the fallen petals of pink,/ fuchsia and white bougainvillea, dried to paper.”

—Tina Barr, “On the Loom”

Daniela, our tour guide, meets us at the top of Montelucco, chasing her tiny daughter, Mathilde, who is not chasing anything, not the pigeons like many children do here, on the paved slate tiles of the upper city, or even the feral cats who bend, mostly, under any hand. We have just ascended the gravel, found the fountain, had a cigarette. She leads us to the hovel of a monastery, St. Francis’s. With pink on the apples of her cheeks, she pins the air, rends it, and asks us to press an eye, too see through time to the ugly little man with the burlap bruising his skin, who needed to be alone so much that he climbed this mountain with no water and punctured the earth and God’s mouth was on the other side, flowing clear and sweet. Mathilde wiggles in her arms, palms her mother’s gray. We enter and everything is brown and flat, the tiny rooms like five cells in a beehive where a summer with no rain has desiccated the honey. The entrances to each room are so low, only Mathilde can fit, and she tries, before Daniela swings her up again, not high, not to Heaven, the roof is so low, only to her arms again, strong and tan. Daniela explains us the mystery, that Francis and his monks would have to bow in submission to God every time they passed through their rooms.

Original Prompt 1, Week 5

“Before I was born the evicted/ Irish walked this road,/ with no notion where to aim/ their anger. What was left// of their households bruised/ their shoulders. What remained/ was a broken gate and the reek/ of spoiled potatoes.”

—R.T. Smith, “Road Fever”

Before I was born, women drenched young girls in gowns white as ash, the white of the eyes, the white of marble, the white of the marble of the Forum where they would live, tending fire with soft hands that never knew their own hearths. What privilege, feet wrapped in soft leather straps, gold wreathing curls, to stand beside the returning emperor, to be Nike, wings reflecting hard as iron in the city’s eyes, gathered, standing always, forever like the massive columns ringing the city, like the immense ring of the Coliseum, never to be eaten away. Forbidden to eat, the vestals would breathe earth if found with an apple in their bellies, banked fires. Now, the wet kisses of a thousand red poppies cover the Forum’s weeds and high grass, the marble dissolved, mere suds in the vast centuries, and teenagers kiss on the wasted stone. Nike looks on from every direction, gold face reflecting from twin chariots on the roof of the Museum of Italian Immigration, wings clipped, mouth closed to a grimace, her hard feet missing wind and the cries of the masses. I drift through the Forum, wanting my boyfriend’s body next to me, sweating together in the heat of Rome.

Memory 1, Week 5

Josh picked me up at the coffee shop where I had just finished training. Nervous and excited, I changed in the bathroom, pulling off the black t-shirt, too big, the white letters already peeling, already stained with espresso and bleach, and drug on a dress, new black Goodwill flats. I met him out in the parking lot and grabbed a wrinkled grocery bag of tape cassettes from my car. On the drive to Rome, we baked in Georgia July heat, trying to make a soufflé of conversation rise through the countryside and the awkward lyrics of “When a Man Loves a Woman” from a Most Beloved Oldies compilation. Rome was quaint and a little run down at the edges. We arrived at a sketchy antique shop, massive in size, even from the outside, where only one floor is visible. All ply-board and dust, stuffed with furniture, worthless books, and decades past’s fall collections, we were easily lost. When we returned to Carrollton, we parked in Adamson Square and walked the town, edging toward a wooden bridge over the train tracks, asking each other questions. We climbed the oak boards to the top and stood looking out over the rust and metal that cuts through the heart of the city. “I have a question for you,” he said, “Do you want to kiss?”

Peer Comments 1, Week 5

Down a hole too small for six foot men,

I become a blue cell, following damp

Stone arched arteries. Forcing me one-way

To an opening of crimson cells 

That pulse like a heart with the beat

Of flashing green, white, red lights.

Diving into the right atrium, valves clog

With sweating bodies in hip swaying motion.

I side-walk to a cashier with a drink menu,

The slurring drinkers circulate around me

Like blood vessels, paying for throat burning

Plasma in wine glasses. I order Apple Rum

Then Toast jacket zippers and strangers,

With an unspoken cin cin, and spill my glass

Into a puss pocket that will be taken out in the morning.

My fuzzy mind, controls my bends and stumbles

So that each red-face grin can rotate around me. 

I escape to the left ventricle, and up the vein

That leads to the upstairs smoking section.

The fear of many breaths too close and few familiar faces

Squeeze my cheeks and pump nicotine through my teeth.

I have been separated from my other corpuscles

And shiver with being passed on without them.

Once the Marlboro has been sucked of all its flame, the dance begins again

And my dried foreheads become misty once more.

I stand at the top looking at all the blending heads of brown

Until I see one too tall and too blonde to be an Italian.

Fusing with the rim of his sweat shirt we fight the current

And weave up the central artery and out

Into the streets of the main body that is Bologna.

—Shaunna Chamlee, “The Circulatory System of The Italian Club”

Shaunna, I commend you on a really interesting and unique analogy between a foreign club and the physical human heart. Your draft evidences strong and imagistic passages throughout; “damp stone arched arteries,” “valves clog with sweating bodies in hip-swaying motion,” and “pump nicotine through my teeth” particularly show signs of training. It is also evident that you’ve put some time and research into this, and I admire your commitment. For revision and drafting, I would suggest downplaying the heart side of the analogy. Use the language of the heart without making your conceit too obvious. This first draft is mainly weak in its capacity to be dialogical; you give the reader too much. You want to balance between too clear and too obscure in creative work. I would also suggest pondering these questions: What makes an Italian club more like a heart than a club back home? What might that say about Italian club life or your relationship to Italy? Your piece has not yet reached its ending or its meditation on the subject. You should also contemplate how the pieces within the draft work together. Because you are very explicit in your comparison of the heart and the club, smoking fits much less, which is a part of this draft you emphasize. Good work, Shaunna; I look forward to seeing further drafts.

Image Junkyard 4, Week 5

Proud of my parolaccia, I whisper to Samuele, "Non ho fatto cazzo...I didn't do dick," and he leans forward, furrows like the lines of vineyards pushing forward on his forehead, "That's not Italian, that's Napoli." And I ask if all bad words come from Naples, a joke he doesn't get. Naples hangs its bad words from the balconies crammed between dingy skyscrapers like dirty sheets.

Image Junkyard 3, Week 5

From Spoleto to Orvieto, the Montefalco vineyards spread across the soft hills and valleys like the teeth of rakes or plucked feathers on a desk, ready for quilling. The olive trees tangle the horizon, disappearing behind mountains where the fog pools in the morning.

Image Junkyard 2, Week 5

Deadletter. The caves of Orvieto, the underground city, hundreds of thousands of caverns dug below the terra cotta, the pale stucco, the duomo where Mary's face peers out a hundred times, house a million mailboxes carved into the walls, roosts for ancient pigeons, who used to fold inside their feathers in sleep, roll up like scrolls.

Image Junkyard 1, Week 5

When I am home, head bowed over the man I’ll ring in gold in a year’s time, head now ringed in clover and red clay as I hover over him, sticky with honeysuckles sweating in the heat as we hide between scuppernong and muscadine, I don’t want to remember the vineyards excavating Pompeii, how the ants crossed the soft leaves cheek to cheek with the maze of rock dug out of old ash, as I cover him in skin soft as ash. Afterwards, bare feet on the dirty raw marble of our front porch, as I burn a Camel Blue to stub and ash, I want to see what I missed, my own piece of urban sprawl, my own dying town of busted cement, the Gingko Bilbao greening, the only one on the street. I don’t want to miss the forbidden foam of the afternoon cappuccino, the Sunday stroll of families, elegantly shuffling along the second tier of upper city Spoleto, children chasing pigeons. Picking through the decaying pecans from last season’s falling, I don’t want to look up, expecting contrails, and see how the sky opens without Montelucco’s head or the sepulchre of its sacred forest’s rotting trees. I just want to undress my fiancé in a backyard sewed in sugar snap and the sound of the cinnamon ladies pecking, cicadas deathly mating, part vines thick with sour-skinned grapes starting to burst sweetness, and burst sweetness. Forget Garibaldi Square on a Friday night in the smoke of the bonfire fingering the empty clothesline, make a sacred forest from popped cans of PBR.

Gomorrah, Part Two

The second part of Roberto Saviano’s Gomorrah delves into the mythos underlying not only the Camorra, but also the mythos underlying Saviano’s own resistance of the mafia. Saviano refers to the archetypal Don Peppino Diana and a young, female schoolteacher, both people in Camorra-owned southern Italy who defied and made declarations against the mafia. Saviano repeatedly calls on the power of “the word” as he brings his account to a close, detailing a visit to the grave of Pier Paolo Pasolini and invoking his 1974 “I Know” political speech. Saviano’s travelling to Pasolini’s grave, along with his accounts of Don Peppino Diana and other defiant figures, calls forth the power of a resistant Italy, a space of inspiration. In this way, Saviano waxes Romantic. The Camorra likewise delves into history, art, and film. One of the most striking lines of Part Two is in the chapter “Hollywood”: “It’s not the movie world that scans the criminal world for the most interesting behavior. The exact opposite is true” (250). The Camorra is not only the direct offspring of fierce economic competition and class inequality, but Hollywood. Saviano reveals an Italy built from inaccurate representations of inaccurate representations, simulacrum. The Camorra is hyper-real and much of its power seems embedded in that pure mythos of The Godfather, Goodfellas, Scarface, and Tarantino. Saviano also speaks of the real, the dead, both human and ecological, that result from this potent mixture of the economic and filmic hyper-real, systems with no basis in reality that destroy the real and tangible.