Julia Lisella
Image by Antonio Cansino on Pixabay
Julia Lisella is the author of two full-length collections of poetry: Always and Terrain (both from WordTech Editions) and the chapbook, Love Song Hiroshima (Finishing Line Press, 2004). Her poems are widely anthologized and are forthcoming or have appeared in Ploughshares, Paterson Literary Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Antiphon, Ocean State Review, Literary Mama, Salamander, Prairie Schooner, Valparaiso, and others. She has received residencies from the Vermont Studio Center, MacDowell, Millay, and Dorset colonies, and has received a number of grants from the Massachusetts Cultural Council to lead community poetry workshops. Her scholarship focuses on American women modernists. She is Professor of English at Regis College in Massachusetts. She co-curates the Italian American Writers in Boston Literary Series at I Am Books in Boston’s North End.
Resident Italian
At the residency for artists and writers
I offer to make bitter greens
the way my mother made them
there was no recipe
my mother dove her fistfuls of greens
into the sizzling pan of olive oil and garlic
don’t let the garlic burn, see?
I saw her reach in, and the greens would mound up
then turn a brighter green as they settled in
their wetness a kind of healing and cooling of the spitting cloves
steam of the descending liquid that clung to the greens
draping everything
if it was escarole there would be raisins and pine nuts
if it was broccoli rabe, red pepper flakes
if it was spinach the leaves would quickly become one with the garlicky bottom
That night I liked the way my fellow artists stood by
not too close to my strega-like movements
over the simmering and tender leaves.
Hoping to learn something, they stared at the bottle of olive oil
as I poured but could not say
how much would be enough
or how many cloves of garlic I’d chopped
or what should come next
how high to keep the flame
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
© 2022 West Trade Review
Stay Connected to Our Literary Community. Subscribe to Our Newsletter
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
