TE22 Potpourri

Ángelo Néstore

Impure Acts

Minotaur, una digressione

A Geranium

My mother’s neighbors proudly show off their legacies. From ropes stretching from the window frames they hang their grandchildren’s dirty linen like flags reminding them of all they’ve won. Their trophies drip into my mother’s yard, the promise of a dynasty that won’t die with themselves. My mother, however, has hidden bloodlines, her blinds closed shut. Sometimes I imagine her tired, listening to Battiato, I imagine her stretched out barefoot, clutching my shirts, upon the clean sheets of my empty bed: daughter, mother, orphan, widow, a dry tree whose roots sprout and die within her throat.

Every time I return home and I imagine opening the door, leaving the key, shouting your name, every time I return home and sense the hunger (another dirty plate to wash on the counter) I approach the window, water my flower pot and I imagine you taking care of it

and I imagine you sinking your fingers in the murky waters of my generations.

How many oceans might there be within you, I wonder, how many seas. We’re alike in the clumsiness of our gestures, in the slowness of our step. We’d search in the geranium for the names of the fathers that never existed. We’d thus invent our story, we’d call the wet earth bread and we’d dirty our hands caressing the roots: an army of bodies buried, invisible, which tickle your hungry little-girl palms and just for an instant you’d feel that I’ve saved you.

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