An angel at my table
by Francesca Del Moro
Editorial
by Francesca Del Moro
“Then I rise disembodied from the dark to grasp and attach myself like a homeless parasite to the shape of my identity and its position in space and time.”
Janet Frame
We can’t be alone, we all need a guide, a solace, somebody who would never leave us. No matter if it is real or dreamt of, present or absent: we all need an angel. But unless it is ratified by religion, an angel can be seen as a symptom of madness, especially of schizophrenia. The angel we are looking for can be an ideal and beloved creature, an absence contemplated with tenderness or maybe what the unforgettable Agrado of Almodóvar defined as “what you’ve dreamed of being”. In a distant brother, a real or imaginary mirror of herself, Antonella Troisi looks for her origin, in order to start again. Sitting at the table with her daughters, Tina Caramanico contemplates the simulacrum of the daughter she has lost or to whom she herself denied a life. The melancholy figure portrayed by Rita Galbucci is waiting for her dreamt of identity before going back to daily rituals. One morning a flock of angels takes Francesca Serragnoli by surprise: they are the lunatics, with their eyes ready to be amazed like children’s, the lunatics that go away after having presented her with a new awareness.
At the Table in the Evening
by Tina Caramanico
At the table in the evening
Among my daughters
While I serve out
There is you, who don’t exist.
Whom you would resemble,
Which talents
And torments
You would have brought to the world
I don’t know.
I don’t know because I can’t see you,
I sense you
But I can’t feel you.
And yet, daughter who don’t exist
In front of your soup that doesn’t exist
At the table in the evening
You always ask a question,
Always the same:
You are there, I am not
Why?
Sign
by Antonella Troisi
My face
far away
or is it yours,
brother,
that goes
further and further away?
Stay with me
glimmer of a memory –
don’t vanish,
stay –
and I will have a cord
to knot myself again.
She hides her feelings and only pretends
by Rita Galbucci
She hides her feelings and only pretends
To look at the end of the dark street
In the late afternoon
With the excuse that she is waiting
For someone who is late.
She lays her red-hot cheek against the pane
Like she did when she was a child
The frozen window doesn’t lie
With its shiver that makes the skin crawl.
Hot and cold light and darkness
In between the time of a twirl
A waiting time indefinite time
Picked up with the hands a slight smile
And given with the soup at the table.
This morning I saw the lunatic
by Francesca Serragnoli
This morning I saw the lunatic
get off the white minibus
accompanied like children on a trip
a woman with a cap
a man with strands of hair combed over his boldness
those faces were so frightening!
They light up for the slightest thing
taken by the hand they have
the children’s glance
they point at everything
October sun falling down
on women without make-up
laughters as piercing as swords
I said them goodbye as if they were children
they waved their hands
hands that I see behind me
rise in the sky like quails
and vanish leaving to me
the first friendship of the world, the air.
(Il rubino del martedì, Raffaelli Editore 2010)