Tag: Italian

Thursday, Taxi from Linate by Gabriele Micozzi

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Thursday, Taxi from Linate

The driver hears my accent and says
Le Marche? —
the way some men say the name
of a woman they once knew.
Yes. My grandfather. The Conero,
the white road that drops to the sea
between two olive trees.
Mine too, he says,
though I doubt it,
and I love him for the lie. So I tell him a smaller one back:
that I’m only in Milan for one night,
when I know it will be three.
We are even now.
He laughs — a big, wet, southern laugh
that belongs to no consultant I have ever met —
and turns up the radio:
some old Battisti song
about a woman waiting in a yellow house. For ten minutes
I do not think about the keynote at seven.
The Milan traffic parts
like a slow book opening.
I notice everything fast, the way I always have:
the woman on the scooter with the dog in her jacket,
the boy reading Pavese at the red light,
the smell of pizza al taglio from a doorway
I will think about all evening.
Past the cathedral, past the bank towers,
past the Italy that pays my fees
and forgets my name. When we arrive
I tip him more than I should
for a reason that has nothing to do
with the keynote,
and everything to do
with two men who have just agreed
to misremember the same coast.

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Gabriele Micozzi is an Italian poet, writer, professor, and consultant from the Marche region of Italy. He has published poetry with Transeuropa, AttraVerso, and GFE, and essays with FrancoAngeli and Dario Flaccovio. His recent work explores work, travel, family, identity, and the quiet fractures of contemporary life.

Learning Italian by Julia Caroline Knowlton

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Learning Italian

I leave my Ohio English, native tongue,
its lockstep clip-clop like horse hooves

on a road, its one syllable words like
birds on a wire or fruit pie in a pan.

I learn chiacchierare—to chit chat—
admiring how the letters pirouette.

Pure music subsumes me—alba, oro,
fruttivendolo, verdurivendolo.

I fade innamorata in wonder within
curved waves of gold leaf words formed

like drapery in stone or scrolls of violins.
Now perne in a gyre, blue turn I disappear.

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Julia Caroline Knowlton PhD MFA is a poet and Professor of French at Agnes Scott College in Atlanta. The author of five books, she was named a Georgia Author of the Year in 2018. Her 2005 memoir, Body Story, was named an outstanding title by the American Library Association. Victoria Chang, the current New York Times Magazine Poetry Editor, has described Knowlton’s poetry as “devastatingly lyrical.” Recognition for her work includes an Academy of American Poets Prize and a Pushcart nomination. She regularly publishes her poetry in journals such as One Art and Trouvaille Review.