My Father’s X-Ray
reveals a the spirit of sprezzatura. This is his birthright. His bones twisted in the clumsy ballet they
are prone to when they make acquaintance with concrete. Feet aloft one moment, splayed the next. My father thinks wellness is nothing but tedium, so he mixes it up a bit
just to keep us on our toes. We note this carefully. The X-ray did not reveal his sacred and
studded heart, his brutal neutrality in most situations, but we asked the doctor, who seems to be
ageing himself, beyond what seems reasonable, to look anyway. He likes my father’s stoicism, which has
nothing to do with anything. . He winks and tells him that he knows some women
he’s personally sent on to the afterlife who would like to meet a man who smiles
through pain with stoicism. An attractive
trait, the doctor adds as dust falls from his furry ears, a glint in his
eye as to what possibly awaits him, as well. Nevertheless, my father’s X-ray,
fluorescent and hanging on the wall, reveals
all that it is capable of. The aged
vodka on the doctor’s shelf is not medicinal, and he himself is no apothecary. At least that much is evident.
When Summer Begins to Die
my mother begins to hear old time ballads,
a deep voice crooning the vagaries of love and romance, planets far away. It is
difficult to pinpoint when it began. She enjoys the music immensely, but it
interrupts her telenovelas. She says
that the singing stops and starts in
fits, and the man singing just might have a temper. Her unusually large ear, fit with the flesh coloured hearing
aid, twitches and swivels in different directions, doing reconnaissance, tries to pick up an errant musical signal. Her own
mother, long gone, interrupts the musical broadcast with advice on being old,
and how, at some point, your life is just full of generalisations and
unanswered prayers. My mother tells her times
have changed. English poets wrote
sonnets for 400 years, now what? But her mother recedes, and the crooning
begins again. My mother closes her eyes
and smiles. Opens her mouth to say
something, then thinks better of it. Can you hear it? Can you
hear it she asks, with elation and
numbness for what is to be, as I close the window, before the novel cool air we
desperately thought we wanted, reaches her, unaware.
Plenary , 1972
When my grandmother took my hair into her
hands, she braided it like Holy Easter bread.
She tried to pull me into something that only she had yet to forget. On
the floor between her knees I felt the tug of tradition like a surrogacy gone
wayward and with remittance still due.
Later, when she spread the laminated holy cards with prayers that would help her attain
indulgences beyond her last breath, on her wide lap, I tried to reconcile her
piety with my mother’s taurine nature.
When she told us her dream of the Sacred Heart coming to claim her at
sundown, my mother waved the thought away like a story she’d heard a thousand
times before. Even I knew that everyone
had an endpoint. There were some things we could never know for sure, but that
was one of them. The Catholic school girl in me chose to believe in all of the
ecclesiastical collateral she’d accumulated. My mother hoped that the dream
she’d told us was misguided, meant for someone else, after all. But she was her
mother’s daughter. My mother’s eye twitched and we felt the force of
divination. The birthright no one ever wanted to claim.
Michelle Reale
is the author of several poetry collections, including Season of
Subtraction (Bordighera Press, 2019) Blood Memory (Idea
Press, 2021) and Confini: Poems of Refugees in Sicily (Cervena Barva Press,
2022). She is the Founding and Managing Editor for both OVUNQUE
SIAMO: New Italian-American Writing and The Red Fern Review.
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