I Want To Go To Torre del Greco, But I'm In Queens

A boy I know has been to Italy and I haven't. This is a relatively common occurrence, for someone I know or even love to have been somewhere I'm envious of. All the people in this lonesome town have, bouncing around Europe or the Caribbean like rich frogs. I never find myself too distraught at this, because I have faith I'll get where I need to go eventually. Today, for some odd reason, I can't shove off the jealousy. The despair at being trapped somewhere your predecessors never wanted to be. I can feel them in my veins and my heart and even my soul, asking to go home with desperate grace. All the mournful resignation of someone who's across the sea from where they need to go.

My Nonna is buried in a Queens graveyard. I've always been a spiritual girl. I may have been born and bred outside of Brooklyn, but I've always thought I belonged to something else. Like my true being is trapped underneath the dirt with her, trying to claw it's way out through the thickly packed soil, and it's my duty to dig her body up and pull myself out. I'm not going to do that, obviously. That's get me throw in jail and then I'd really never go anywhere. But I imagine myself doing it all the time, freeing her, freeing myself, freeing every person I carry inside me and sending them with a grand gesture across the Atlantic. I look at her marriage records, all in Italian. I cry thinking about it too hard. Where did her tongue go? Where did her dreams go? Where did her section of the world go, when she was buried 4,820 miles from her home? I've never even been to her grave. That's an expensive trip, for a girl like me.

That's why I hate everybody for going to Italy. I hate everybody who's been to Naples even more. I don't really hate them at all but I hate them just enough to mourn experiences I've never had. New York City is strange with my father. He takes his calloused finger, not removing his palm from the steering wheel, and points ahead at the brick buildings. "This used to be an Italian neighborhood." He says. I imagine her there, walking down the street, recreating something she lost through a community also in mourning. It's like a support group, when immigrants come together like that. It'll never look the same or smell the same, but they try because when something's stolen you try and get it back. Do you think she ever smelt the sea again? Or did she stand in front of a fish-tank in the doctor's office and close her eyes? Sometimes I do. That's how I know being dead doesn't really mean anything. Everything you've done, someone else will do.

I know she remembers the smell of cigarettes and fire. My father told me this story, how they woke up one night and the bowling alley across the street had burned down. He said it's because it was getting expensive or something or other, and the owners didn't want to pay, so everybody thinks they lit their own bowling alley up in the middle of the night. But that's not the smell I'm talking about here. My Nonna's baby died. She was sitting out on a Manhattan stoop and someone tossed a cigarette and lit the baby's linen dress on fire. She burned to death agonizingly. Who could forget the smell of an infant's burning flesh, even in death? There are somethings you just carry and nobody can ever remove them. Like she must remember the sea lapping at her feet like all those city stray dogs, she must remember death the best. It's in-fact what we do best, my family. We die.

I was born late. Not that it matters either, I wouldn't have made it to Italy no matter when I was born in America, but it counts for something devastating. My father said my Nonna didn't speak much English, rather garbled pieces of her thick Italian dialect and out of place English words she had acquired. If I was born when she was around, maybe that Napoleonic dialect wouldn't be quite so dead, like the rest of us. I was never taught how to dance the Tarantella. I never cooked with my Nonna. I never got to walk the streets of an Italian neighborhood, with my hairy brown arms and thick curls at only five, and not feel like everyone was staring at me for being so strange. So different, so early, so ugly. Can you imagine living in such a pre-dominantly white area, they think being Italian is a curse? A shade below sickly pale is a death sentence? I looked at all them with their white as ghosts skin and veiny blue inner-workings and sighed. There was one other girl who looked like me, in that school. She got called a frog and I got called a beast. Isn't that bizarre? Isn't it cruel? Isn't it what makes this place what it is? Isn't it something we just have to bear? To make it where we need to go?

Isn't it the opposite of what she wanted?

Isn't it so American?

Isn't it unfair, 

how the rich kids with their lizard bodies can bring themselves home, and I'm here? 

In a Queens graveyard,

with nowhere I can go?