Sons, I love you in a basket
By Maria Surricchio
of figs dripping in Adriatic heat, in the mulberry-stained strings of a mandolin, rowdy goats, vines ablaze in autumn, and the jewel-colored lining of a dark wool coat. I love you in day arriving all-at-once after smooth night cracks open, and spring that can’t make up its mind— will it come, will it try today? I love you in a painting I saw once of wondrous anatomy— how the heart filled the chest and had to be cradled— and the forty frescoes of the Vatican Map Gallery, all cities south of Rome announcing their names upside down. I love you in the sound of geese before I see them, the same beach walk three times in one day, in the octopus— den festooned like a holiday parade as she begins to waste away. And in your father, clipped cinnamon saint, who puts fish sauce in every recipe, keeps seven hives but doesn’t eat honey, releases trout to a stream as though it’s a bassinet of reeds. Our boys, we miss the mark constantly. Still, I love how you’re every point on a compass, and we’re like the Pineapple Express— I’m often hot, he’s mostly heavy—but not in our overwhelming arrival, in how we circled and circled before making landfall.
Maria Surricchio is originally from the UK and now lives near Boulder, Colorado. A life-long lover of poetry, she began writing in 2020 after a long marketing career. Pushcart-nominated, her work has been published and is forthcoming in Pirene's Fountain, Poet Lore, Lily Poetry Review, The Comstock Review, I-70 Review, and elsewhere. She has a BA in Modern Languages from Cambridge University and is an MFA candidate at Pacific University.
11/8 / Meet the Artist with visiting poet-in-residence Ruby Hansen Murray / The Library at The Betsy-South Beach, Miami Beach, FL / Live and Live-Streamed on Instagram Live/Facebook Live at @swwimmiami / 6:00 pm EST / Free
11/8 / Poetry Reading with visiting poet-in-residence Ruby Hansen Murray and local poet Judy Ireland / The Library at The Betsy-South Beach, Miami Beach, FL / Live and Live-Streamed on Instagram Live/Facebook Live at @swwimmiami / 7:30 pm EST / Free
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Beautiful!