Italian for You

cooking for Antonio

Some give up their skins
easily, but you slipped

a gourd, glanced sideways
at the past, welled up like a gorge

with flirty water. I was young
as miracles, when I was afloat

before frustrated. Sound
gabbles up like flames, like ice

shrills off a liminal map. My flight
across the Swiss peaks, so close

to the sun: the blond Alps—
like gold teeth—guarded gates

to Malpensa (o night of Europe, o red
eye, and stiff neck). Strange thought, I left

what’s known to melt into
stew: bare beef, and armpit

of scent; this lure of the grist,
of the grind; this evening spent; this

myth ended without mint—in stir
and in season (tomato,

fat and meat)—in
you: oh, delicious descent.

Note: Malpensa is an airport in Milan, an Italian city that deported Jews to their deaths during WWII. Today, travelers from the West fly over the Swiss Alps to reach its gates.

 
Susan Comninos

Susan Comninos is the winner of the 2010 Yehuda Halevi Poetry Competition run by Tablet Magazine. Previously, her poetry appeared in Forward, Lilith, Tikkun, Judaism, Calapooya and The Blueline Anthology (Syracuse Univ. Press, 2004), among others. Her fiction recently debuted in Quarterly West. She lives in New York, where she works as a freelance journalist.

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