Antonella Anedda

gives joy only if read in a broken rhythm, pausing at every period, parting your lips a little at the colons What: a pity to die my love. To say: "I don't love you anymore" with no one listening. What: a shame the irritated voice the haste. The distance between the first passionate whisper and this new timbre. How little shame I have. to have killed you and put you here. beneath the very expanse you created. The: expanse. Is: a cloth. Is: white. Is: a sheet. Is: a land on which snow has fallen. Ssh. you'll be alone there. No longer on top. but. under. as is proper for the dead, as is proper for seed. and. for lilies yet to sprout. You'll feel something like moving scratches: those are birds mice my own bony hands that you adored my tongue with its thirst. Brr. love. how. painful for me to see you shrunken by this chill so stripped of your gifts in this tomb where I can't grieve for you but can only dig down to the earth down to its iron to the fire that now embraces the earth and celebrates me.

I love her fierceness when she fights me, shouting "Not fair!" Her eyes slitting like shutters in cities by the sea. Her life is rife with bonfires—seen and unseen— fires that burn through the turning years bringing her to life again, and again, in a miracle of smoke. This heat gives her a sense of forgiveness—or so I imagine— she kisses my back, capriciously, when I scold her. Maybe she recalls the scalpel by which she was born. Easy, the mark of its slash in my skin. She rose from my belly as I slept. We're bound together by peace, no shrieks of pain, and my modesty. We're a canvas by Giovanni Bellini: a virgin and a sweet rabbit.