Unseen
by Michelle Messina Reale
Some secrets masquerade as white silk, with gold filigree buttons. Some you have to work harder for, like pitching a shovel into solid ground, turning the gritty dirt over and over. In one home, a family sits in a room, together, but separate, all ossified bone and frayed seams. The radio broadcasts to the air. In another, an infant wails, throwing her tiny arms into the air as if in exquisite triumph. Her mother will roll her hair, powder her prominent clavicle, and paint her toenails. Eventually she calls the moon down from the velvet sky. Heats the glass bottle on the ring of blue flame.
Something of Our Lives While We Waited for You
by Michelle Messina Reale
Some years, in the middle zone, felt like Sundays: bleary and interminable. I took matters into my own hands. I slept dusty and pulsating in drawers of various sizes. I ate the lint in ancient closets, hung myself from a Victorian hook in the dirt floor garage that offered respite. If you think you can’t live your life like this, think again. I wanted to coax my mother from her deep slumber that took her far from us. I ironed my father’s shirts, like straitjackets, into respectable daily shrouds, an expanse of cotton/poly blend, stiff with grave disappointment and starch. My sister was a ghost nursing her thumb, while cleaved to my mother’s benevolence, pinching the nerves between our eyes at every chance. My brother read a schedule of canceled trains with a squint and like the rest of us, made optimistic, alternate plans for the future.
Michelle Messina Reale is an Italian-American poet and a professor at Arcadia University in Glenside, Pennsylvania. She is the author of nine collections of poetry including Season of Subtraction, Bordighera Press, 2019 and Confini: Poems of Refugees in Sicily, Cervena Barva Press, 2020. Michelle’s work has been published widely both online and in print including the 2010 Best of the Net Anthology. “Unseen” and “Something of Our Lives While We Waited for You” are poems from her collection Season of Subtraction.
by Michelle Messina Reale
Some secrets masquerade as white silk, with gold filigree buttons. Some you have to work harder for, like pitching a shovel into solid ground, turning the gritty dirt over and over. In one home, a family sits in a room, together, but separate, all ossified bone and frayed seams. The radio broadcasts to the air. In another, an infant wails, throwing her tiny arms into the air as if in exquisite triumph. Her mother will roll her hair, powder her prominent clavicle, and paint her toenails. Eventually she calls the moon down from the velvet sky. Heats the glass bottle on the ring of blue flame.
Something of Our Lives While We Waited for You
by Michelle Messina Reale
Some years, in the middle zone, felt like Sundays: bleary and interminable. I took matters into my own hands. I slept dusty and pulsating in drawers of various sizes. I ate the lint in ancient closets, hung myself from a Victorian hook in the dirt floor garage that offered respite. If you think you can’t live your life like this, think again. I wanted to coax my mother from her deep slumber that took her far from us. I ironed my father’s shirts, like straitjackets, into respectable daily shrouds, an expanse of cotton/poly blend, stiff with grave disappointment and starch. My sister was a ghost nursing her thumb, while cleaved to my mother’s benevolence, pinching the nerves between our eyes at every chance. My brother read a schedule of canceled trains with a squint and like the rest of us, made optimistic, alternate plans for the future.
Michelle Messina Reale is an Italian-American poet and a professor at Arcadia University in Glenside, Pennsylvania. She is the author of nine collections of poetry including Season of Subtraction, Bordighera Press, 2019 and Confini: Poems of Refugees in Sicily, Cervena Barva Press, 2020. Michelle’s work has been published widely both online and in print including the 2010 Best of the Net Anthology. “Unseen” and “Something of Our Lives While We Waited for You” are poems from her collection Season of Subtraction.