Daniela Gioseffi

The peach is a belly dancer's fruit. It has a navel eye for seeing the world through the skin, rounded buttocks good to place against the hand the way earth reminds flesh of its being. Through the eye of the needle, death is a country where people wonder and worry what it's like to live. The sullen wish to live and live soon to be done with death and the happy want to stay dead forever wondering will it hurt to live and is there death after death?

A silver watch you've worn for years is suddenly gone, leaving a pale white stripe blazing on your wrist. A calendar, marked with appointments you’ve meant to keep, disappears, leaving a faded spot on the wall where it hung. You search the house, yard, trash cans for weeks, but never find it. One night the glass in your windows vanishes, leaving you sitting in a gust of wind. You think how a leg is suddenly lost beneath a subway train, or taxi’s wheel, some slippery afternoon. The child you've raised for years, combing each lock, tailoring each smile, each tear, each valuable thought, suddenly changes to a harlequin, joins the circus passing in the street, never to be seen again. One morning you wash your face, look into the mirror, find the water has eroded your features, worn them smooth as a rock in a brook. A blank oval peers back at you, too mouthless to cry out.

They've flown south now and one Great Egret fishes the pond as broad-winged hawks begin their migrations, kenneling on thermal currents of wind off above yellowing mountains. Now, snakeweed blooms along the trail choking white and purple asters. A few bleeding leaves fall amidst wilting greenery. Poison Ivy turns red with warning. My eighty-three-year-old mother still argues with my father, twelve years dead. Their hatred reverberates in a back room of my head, rattling memories of my lonely childhood. Their loathing for each other colors all my days with pain. I loved him because he loved me best, but I look like her, my face and spirit tear at each other. Am I the child of hate? A wounded love sprouts like a weed from watery depths, uncultivated, flowers, white and purple, bloom, even in these days of dying leaves. Beyond winter, no one grieves.