My mother sang opera off-key
while she worked in her kitchen,
favored Pagliacci, a story
of entanglement. The dissonance
irritated me as a teenager
but became part of what I hold
close, the longing for what itches
most after it's gone, for the woman
who never got to use her passport.
Have a career, she advised. It's less
boring. I had a primeval fear
she would devour me,
like the gerbil mother I once observed
in a tank who meticulously
negated all her babies.
Have your own money.
Don't depend on any man.
The colonized body has two choices,
and either way, La commedia è finita!
Lie down with the devil.
Don't lie down.
There will be nothing when you run
out of figs. You will be
like the fireflies, practically gone.
Susana H. Case is the award-winning author of eight books of poetry, most recently, The Damage Done (Broadstone Books, 2022). She is co-editor with Margo Taft Stever of I Wanna Be Loved by You: Poems on Marilyn Monroe (Milk & Cake Press, 2022). Case worked several decades as a university professor/program coordinator in New York City. She is a co-editor of Slapering Hol Press. If This Isn't Love is forthcoming from Broadstone Books in 2024.
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