By Bonné de Blas

Moon and sun cipher the sea. Your first husband on the mainland.
Late afternoon a tessellation of calli and campielli. Over hammer-
rung hours, obelisks of conversation buoyed by Prosecco, Amarone,
tides of antipasti, primi, segundi, dolce burble at their foundations.
Your bare knee woos mine throughout each course. Still giddy with
the ombra and folpi your favorite maestro procured, we walk, the
flooded fondementa underfoot, through the opaque languages of
tourists, vowels and consonants blossoming pearls. Peals of bells
echoing in triple-domed colonnades. We are caught in an updraft of
pigeons. Laughing, you lure me into the labyrinth, crumbling
plaster, cracked and corroded brick. Paving stones set one behind
the other. Contorted cast-iron balustrades guide us diagonally over
bridge after bridge, honking boats casting fractured reflections in the
attenuated waters. Sewer rats. Seagulls. Osterias, their patrons
sitting on marble steps, recede enfolded into acute angles. Your arms
outstretched, your palms graze udumbrated granite. Where Jews
once slept behind locked gates, children chase one another, and
clothesline silhouettes of shorts and shirts smudge walls of melon,
rose, and azure. A generation ago, this your sestiere, your campo,
three thousand days bent puzzling over fragmented glass. Here, a
calle measured to your shoulders. Beneath the shuttered windows of
your former studio, you pull me into the doorway. My mouth finds
your throat and the necklace our eldest daughter gave you on her
wedding day. Your fingers reconfigure the constellations of silver
within my black hair. Ripple their way under my shirt, find my
breasts. Skirt shoaled at your waist, my fingers swim across you. In
you. A calico cat leans into my leg. Weaves her length around our
ankles.

Poet and book artist Bonné de Blas is working toward her MFA in poetry at Kent State University in collaboration with the NEOMFA program where she teaches writing composition and creative writing. She received an MA in English with a concentration in Creative Writing from the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, and a JD from Case Western Reserve University School of Law. She is the author of two chapbooks The Act of Dwelling (NightBallet Press) and The Rule of Contraction (Kattywompus Press), and her poems and essays appear in the anthologies What I Knew Before I Knew (Pudding House Press), Lipsmack! (NightBallet Press), and Older Queer Voices: The Intimacy of Survival, Lambert and Einstein, eds. (olderqueervoices.com) for which she was nominated for Best of the Net 2017. Her artists’ books are in the Special Collections of the Cleveland Public Library, and in galleries in France, Mexico, and New Zealand, as well as in many private collections worldwide. She lives with her spouse and two cats in Chattanooga, Tennessee.