Southern Legitimacy Statement: My maternal grandfather was born in the south of the Marche region, southern Italy, in 1930. In 1948 he joined the Carabinieri Corps in hopes to find stable employment after the war, and was sent southern still, to Sicily, to fight mule riding bandits and mafiosi in the town of Corleone, south of Palermo by roughly 35 miles. After three years of every-other-day shootouts he was sent to Florence for two years, and finally to the wetlands of southern Piedmont, where he met my grandma. That’s where I was born and raised, among rice paddies, barred grass snakes, tree frogs, soft rushes, herons and air humidity so thick one could swim in it. I now live 250 miles south of there, in Florence, with my partner. Her father’s from Palermo.
Ghost Country
Wet ectoplasm trudges
through sludge and
water green that drinks you up
until your thirst subsides,
weaving stubble burning
into an incorporeal shave.
