Poems selected from the collection allora ho acceso la luce (TAUT, 2023), translated by Pina Piccolo. This issue contains Iuri Lombardi’s review that appeared in the Italian journal carmilla online
What will we do when the money runs out
if somewhere a bridge awaits us
or perhaps a mother guessing how strong our will
to go on looking for some other part of the pack: but grocery shopping
every day was the first solution against the absurd,
like accepting that we had discovered a monster
under the bed smiling its black smile like part of our family
Amidst the empty rooms
we had left behind a lack :
I still remember our house of poverty
when we still had no power, every bill
cost us either a mother or a back and diminished existence
like matriculating life day by day
or suffering the tragic need for food:
so contained was our hunger
that we dumpster dived.
.
*
last night I consumed a cultural product
with her: poetry too is a
commodity that can be reproduced. Yet I am
the same as you, but I am
Antonio. This poem too will
be called Antonio: Antonio: Antonio
recall me in this poem, if you can.
*
We were still fearful of returning:
we asked uniqueness of something that could not be repeated
just once, like trembling at the ambushes of men,
crying over winter. They would cut our
power again, they would take away
our furniture again, until we would submit to
cast off things: then we took cold showers
until the ice overflowed. I have never known
the end better: I would like to pay the rent with words,
eat paper – instead my real hunger
is to transcribe the rainbow in black and white,
alter the Great Flood: I want to tree the sky with deciduous trees.
*
then I turned on the light: a woman
appears beyond the walls like a happiness
that didn’t have
the green eyes of hope; she seems drunk and falls:
how many times have we believed together in life
or monsters breaking in, escaping beyond the blue
rite like the saliva of a dream
siding with vertigo and forgetting
how the voice sounded before. Everything complained a jungle
or clay again… and kept on collapsing in the cave:
it begged for the impossible alms of emptiness.
***
You were crying: yet seemed to believe in words
and perhaps what you saw can be told
like the revenge of music or
an imageless morality
the arms of existence have taken us
hostage: knowing now that
we only have one way not to die,
to truly live: confessing what we were was urgent.
***
Returning to poetry after a long time
is like finding someone else’s old suit
in your wardrobe: I tried to teach you
how to run on dry plains. You responded
to illness with your soul. Today everyone around me is afraid:
you can be the sunflower of dead stars.
***
uniqueness unraveled along the steppe
like cold suns or ruins
in the rain: night lasted only
once as if it faced an enemy
wishing to mutilate the common origin
before the disparity of suits of diamond:
and then those who still played to avoid being called
looked for the music of the sea
like a special island of whiteness or a crash.
***
Not even a white cliff
wrinkled the fishing
like our immobility that followed rain
over the mountains: we took the bait
because we had to eat like a regret,
I felt you a street away
one that perhaps you wish to travel alone
while on the hill a voice played the tune
of abandonment: our destiny was the binary.
We had made the dinosaurs’ mistake:
we were too big to walk.
Antonio Merola , Rome 1994. Co-founder of the journal “Yawp – L’urlo barbarico”, he collaborates or has contributed to other sites and lietrary journals such as “La Balena Bianca”, “Carmilla”, “Altri Animali”, “Flanerì” (for which he edited the column L’isolamento del romantico americano (The isolation of the American romantic ). Published the book F. Scott Fitzgerald e l’Italia (Ladolfi 2018). In 2019 he was part of the editorial team of the journal “Atelier” and was a finalist in the “Guido Gozzano” Award, unpublished poetry section. His poems have appeared on sites and literary magazines such as “L’attiva” (n. 312), “Nazione Indiana”, “Atelier” (n. 89), “La Bottega di Poesia” in “La Repubblica”, “Nazione Indiana “, “Argo – Poetry of our time”, “Poetarum Silva”, “Pioggia Obliqua” and on the special issue of “A4 – The magazine on a single sheet” dedicated to poetry. It has been translated into English, Spanish and French in “Caravansary – Revista Internacional de Poesía” and in “The Dreaming Machine”. He is among those selected by Alberto Pellegatta and Massimo Dagnino for the volume Planetaria – 27 poets of the world born after 1985 (Taut Edizioni 2020). In 2023 he releases the collection allora ho acceso la luce (so I turned on the light) again with Taut publishing house. He lives in Rome, where he works as a primary school teacher.
