On Language
Cuattro angioloni co le tromme in bocca
se metteranno uno pe cantone, a ssonà
— Giuseppe Gioacchino Belli
What I’ve written for you,
I’ve written in English,
translated from the worlds
of other languages.
I tell myself in Etruscan
zich, zich, write, write:
My body is a land with cities
overlooking different continents.
I tell myself,
se ti sabir, if you know, zich:
I am not lost dictionaries
with words that express
what we are no longer able to.
I tell myself, zich:
I am made of a vocabulary
assembled in ports, made of
the Mediterranean alphabet,
I am Sabir.
As I write,
Belli’s four huge angels
blowing trumpets stand
one in each corner,
playing.
[Note: Zich in Etruscan means write. Etruscan language is a non-Indo-European outlier in the ancient Greco-Roman world. Se ti sabir is written in Sabir, the Mediterranean’s lingua franca, or interlanguage spoken in Mediterranean ports from the 11th to the 19th century.]
◆ ◆ ◆ ◆ ◆
Riccardo Scamarcio
I touched him
with the tip of my tongue.
I began at his chest
slowly traveled down his navel,
made my way to where
he wanted more.
He opened his eyes,
felt the pleasure burning my words,
took my body with both his hands
and placed me on top of him.
It’s not always easy to make this choice
when the lights aren’t dimmed
and the window is so deep.
But the bed, like the world
wasn’t bigger than us,
and sometimes, we have to forget
everything, to hold each other,
sometimes we have to say
fanculo instead of fuck,
and see if it works.
Certo, too much of who we are
can be evident in an instant.
I turned the television on,
Riccardo was speaking French,
and just like that —
I stopped touching him.
That’s the thing about an accent,
it awakens what’s left behind.
◆ ◆ ◆ ◆ ◆
Gasometro
When I look at you
my modern Colosseo,
music is no longer far,
your circular body
your metal heart,
beats everywhere.
You make me wish
to hold something
beyond the world I know,
where I will remove
scenes I never felt close to.
When I look at you
air stuns my lungs,
the city can’t be itself
without you
and I have no reason
to ever leave you.
When I look at you
the poems are quiet,
I sit on my balcone
with a greca full of caffè
flower pots around me
the sun touching my legs
the birds swaying by
the waters not far —
this is the joy I want to remember.
[Note: Gasometro in Rome is an industrial-era gas storage structure in the Ostiense district, symbolizing the city’s 20th-century industrial heritage, and today part of its cityscape.]