#MEMORIA
by Francesca Del Moro
Editorial
by Francesca Del Moro
A space for poetry, a special section only for verses.
Because, after all, poetry communicates in a way that is not so different from how image does. Both are concise and immediate, require a short time to be enjoyed, and yet aim at leaving a deep impression. Poems and images convey emotions, unchain thoughts; the more these last in time, the more the poem or image will be effective.
“Poetry says too much in too short a time; prose says too little and takes too long” as Bukowski said provocatively.
Such a definition of poetry can easily apply to image too. A powerful poem or illustration strokes you or hits you in the stomach, can make you laugh or cry in a moment, starts a stream of thoughts, leaves a mark you’ll keep carrying inside you and, as any artwork, can change your life and your personality. It takes just a few minutes, just the time you need to read (or watch) again the careful artist’s work and discover one by one its smallest details, as if they were tiny, hidden treasures.
Coach 182727
by Silvio Perfetti
to Berto (part I)
The wine drops
Gently dripping from
Your lower lip
As gloomy acrobatics
Of young pilots in the air
The half sugar packet
Doesn’t melt
In the sick memory
The lousy couches
“Where are they taking us”
And here comes the waiter
“Check please”
And that is all you have left
Dear Berto
And coarse scars
Hard as rock
On your face whose breath
is seemingly free
While recurring nightmares
Of swastikas in the wind
In blue skies
Hatefully
Vividly Italians
They make you repeat
As a broken record
“They called it youth
They called it”
Sometimes I come to see you at night
by Milvia Comastri
Sometimes I come to see you at night.
Those odourless nights,
when the dark is a cruel screen,
a bitter vacuum.
I go out through narrow, worn out alleys,
each time unknown.
My companions are the scampering rats
hindering my steps,
and the silent shadows descending
suddenly from leaded balconies.
I walk singing on the edge of my lips
your song, to warm up the silence.
I walk and the rhythm of my heartbeats
makes me closer to your heart, to your home.
But when I get there, my breath breaks
and the blood bites the veins:
your light is off, and the music gives away
to a distant echo.
A bottle rolls over the cobblestones.
I listen to the noise as it turns off
slowly.
Corporea
by AA.VV.
“… I think of men, what could it seem to them
that we see blood pour slowly from our sex,
as if the earth sighed, slightly,
and we felt it, and saw it,
as if life moaned a little, in wonder, and we were it…”
(from “When it comes”, by Sharon Olds)
Through three generation of English-writing female poets, much loved in their own countries but mostly unknown in Italy, this beautiful contemporary anthology questions the relationship of the woman with her body. A physical relationship which nevertheless implies several psychological, social, political and philosophical consequences. Period, pregnancy, birth, desire, sexuality, but also discomfort, violence, ageing and disease are explored with scientific precision and a language which spans from sharp irony to heart breaking lyricism, while always staying authentic and immediate. A powerful and at times disturbing book, wonderfully edited and translated by Loredana Magazzeni, Fiorenza Mormile, Brenda Porster, and Anna Maria Robustelli.