Verses by @elena_rossi

The market closes. Heat leans on the stones,
and via dei Coronari empties out
like a lung. I carry paper bags
that smell of figs and warm wax paper,
the fruit so ripe it bruises at a touch,
and I am thinking of your hands,
how they would lift one gently, thumb
against the split skin, patient as a man
who knows the sweetest thing is always
the one about to fall apart.

We met in a courtyard where the laundry
hung between two windows like a truce,
white sheets breathing in the afternoon.
You said the light in Rome is vulgar,
too much gold, too much insistence,
and I loved you then for being difficult,
for wanting shade. Some nights I still
hear the bicycle chains below, the squeak
and click, the small machinery of people
going home to someone, or to no one.

What I mean is: love is not a cathedral.
It is a kitchen at eleven, cold tiles
under bare feet, the kettle's private
argument with steam, a plum stone
left on the sill. It is the way you fold
my sweater wrong and I say nothing.
It is the fig, split open in my palm.
Eat it before it spoils, you tell me,
and so I do. The juice runs down my wrist,
sweet and mortal, and the evening
turns its slow coin over in the sky.

On the via where the laundry breathes between walls,
she stacked the morning figs in a crate of straw,
purple and split at the seam, still warm from the tree.
Her hands were stained like old church glass.
I bought three for a coin, and she gave me five,
and told me not to bruise them on the walk home.

Her father called from the doorway, half asleep,
a name that sounded like water over stones.
She answered in the dialect of this street,
the one my mother forbade me to speak at school.
For a moment the piazza was a room,
and the room was a country, and the country was hers.

By August the crate stood empty by the wall.
The shutters closed. The laundry kept its slow
argument with the wind. I asked the baker's boy
and he shrugged, and sold me bread, and said the north,
always the north, some factory, some cousin's floor.
The figs went on splitting in other courtyards.

Now when the evening shadows climb the stone
I walk the long way past her door and think
of five figs in a paper twist, and how
she weighed them in her palm before she let them go,
as if to teach me the honest price of things,
as if she knew I would still be counting.