Sunday Poem

A MEAN LITTLE STORY

Claudio’s English girlfriend Stephanie

just left him for his best friend Maurizio,

he’s blasting my scooter, Stronzo

di merda! he hollers, me on the back,

over the rainy cobblestones of Trastevere

near Porta Portese, we both are grief-stricken,

Figlio di puttana! screams Claudio

into a payphone, at Maurizio’s mother!

my marriage with Inge is over so

these weeks he & I dance at discos, drink wine

at the vineria at Campo dei Fiori, do coke,

me blabbing in Italian like a Jamiroquai record

set on forty-five, we’re in his Audi

blaring Pearl Jam’s Ram, at Pyramide,

a string of puttane like Fellini’s Cabiria

in castiron light, but exactly, except

these are trannies, contraltos, sinewy boys

in crinoline, pinfores, prom dresses,

Claudio laughs, rolls my window down,

my heart pounds, blind with excitement,

with fear, a lewd hoopskirt-dolled swineboy

face-like-Cary-Grant’s-pummelled-with-a-pipe

bitches in a savage Romano clip, his

endocrine-born paps spilling into the car,

I reach out, the breast in my hand

like a soul, a mean little story, turgid & warm,

a scar, un bon mot, a limping grackle,

la Tevere limpia, the dream where I’m a scorpion

sipping venom out of my own stinger,

a daisy, a pillar of salt, the myth of the palace

of rotting meat, a soft crystal carapace,

the last scene of Antonioni’s La Notte,

sweet sweet immaculate indigestible fruit.

From Hummingbird (2012) by John Wall Barger.