Welcome to “Poetry at The Arts Fuse.” A new poem every Thursday.

 

On the Shores of the Mediterranean

 

Here’s your problem—

you like boats that wash up

on the shores of the Mediterranean

where there you might expect to find

your grandmother who you grew up calling

Nadda because you couldn’t pronounce

Nonna and you learned too late after she died

for you to ask her how she survived the war

by selling dust to the sky while hidden

under the rubble of her favorite tobacco store

where the proprietor ate-up all the misery in town

and rented a boat and rowed far out

on the Mediterranean and spit it out so it mixed

with all the water of the Mediterranean

and the fish of the Mediterranean breathed it in

and were caught by the local fishermen who

brought it back to shores of the Mediterranean

—or would have

if not for the storm whipped-up by the local

priest who developed a grudge against God

and so took to casting spells on the waters

of the Mediterranean

so the boats washed up

on the shores of the Mediterranean

becoming the rib cages of dinosaurs you mistook

for just a plague of boats that washed up

on the shores of the Mediterranean

where you wanted to open an art gallery

the small kind you could show your Nadda

if she ever crawled out from under the past

and made from the bones of bored romantics

syphilitic show stoppers lazy

on the shores of the Mediterranean

who gave themselves to art so you could

live cheaply above your tiny gallery

in a crooked apartment of plaster

mixed with your pulverized breath

and painted brown

with no room inside to swing a baguette

but big enough to have those

tuberculosis parties with all your personally

hand-picked literati friends and wait out

the storm of a short life by monstering on stilts

or trolling under the history that you know

from books books books you can’t return

to the library because the library is burning

adding smoke to the smoldering ruins

of a flayed woman forming something like

a new religion dousing a lighthouse with

emerging numbers to make math

on the shores of the Mediterranean

where you cast-off a house with someone

you love inside—floating alone while

the evolving ghost of you grows more separate

from everything so even a trembling palm

shuts tight before it would take your money

so it seems you made it to the moon after all

without any booster rockets

just a will to unhinge from one shore

                                                           to another

 

Clay Ventre’s 2023 book, It’s Not Love Till Someone Loses an Eye was published by Nixes Mate Press and shortlisted for the Nossrat Yassini poetry prize. He has work published in Souvenir Lit Journal, Jubilat, Lily Poetry Review, Queen Mob’s Teahouse, Soundings East, and others. He lives in New England where he edits the Incessant Pipe poetry journal.

 

Note: Hey poets! We seek submissions of excellent poetry from across the length and breadth of contemporary poetics. See submission guidelines here. The arbiter of the feature is the magazine’s poetry editor, John Mulrooney.

— Arts Fuse editor Bill Marx