vittorella

 My mother has been dealt a distinctly cruel hand. She grew up mean, in the hollers of Pennsylvania, my rustbelt madonna. They passed her and the seven other kids she shared peeling walls with home to home, from town to town, somewhere they won't be found. Nobody really looks for girls once they're gone, not poor girls like her, you know? It started when she was three. With small hands and feet, soft red lips and hair the same shade as mine. Maybe she was younger, it's been 68 years now. My mother's mother is the antichrist. Dead wrong and dead evil, the old bitch was. She's been dead for years but her restless soul keeps me awake at night, and I think of the grave, and I think of digging her up, and I think of putting a stake through her heart. Three is when my mother's mother first almost beat her to death. I can imagine my mother's frame, lilac bruises down her white legs, curled up that night with a spine bearing the walls of hell. Pennsylvania has alway...

    When We Came From The Sea: A Tale Of The Italian Seaside Il sole rises slowly in the tangerine hue of the empyrean firstlight. The juice of valencia veins dragging up the rims of lush viridescent mountains, forestlands of Apennine wolves and Corsican hares burrowing into the moss-grown underbrush. These hills rest in our archaic bones, borne of the land before time. Molded by the calluses and marrow elbows of gone saints, countenance covered by a delicate milk veil. They were us, once. Scraping against our cerulean harbor, seeping below our ghostly wake. The outskirts of Naples is our birth. Years of dipping feet into azure soft waves, chasing innocence down amber shorelines. Sat atop fractured cerise bricks of our history, pulling oiled olive-toned knees to small jawbones. To abandon this fishing town was foreign, harshly curved syllables on alien tongue. Here we are our own mythology. Threading folktales of midnight seas and divine lands inside the bursting infernos of c...