Within weeks her city will be burning its two fevers
as will the city of my adoption.
Her city was my city. She is vacuuming
in her sports bra and leggings,
lifting the vacuum across the wide couch. Happy, temporarily,
her roommates have fled for a suburban house in Florida;
the apartment will stay clean.
She is not even breathless wielding the wide vacuum.
The phone moves with her. I’m dizzy with the frame’s movement.
I’m propped on a shelf. I watch a light fixture on her ceiling
as I listen to a vacuum noise, a voice.
While we talk, I stare at a photo printed on plain paper
thumbtacked to the bulletin board behind my computer,
curled at its edges. She is 12 in it, just days before her first period
and future dull aches, fevers, and tears without definite source.
Her back is to me, long hippy skirt and dark braids both in mid-swing
meadow grass at her ankles, little brother following behind her.
Task complete she slides me over to her galley kitchen,
propped I imagine on the ledge of her backsplash,
pulls a box from the freezer, unwraps it,
crinkle sound rushes through the phone line,
slam of microwave and fridge,
disappears from my frame, returns
fork in hand, looks around, breaks a plastic seal and the steam
rises from the white bowl.
Now the tour: window frame taped up from an attempted
break in, cracked fixture in the bathroom,
its long leak. She is calm. In a later phone call I’ll learn
when Manhattan goes dark, she locks herself up in her bedroom,
the eeriness of midtown’s empty streets a shudder
until light breaks. At her age I was married,
the subway fare a token, pressed and brassy and worn in.
The girl in the center of danger holds me in her palm now,
waves to me, the red button I hit that ends our night together
nearly caress. I watch her climb through the meadow’s grass.
I can only see the back of her head,
the beautiful hair swinging.
Published in Cider Press Review, Volume 23, Issue 6.
Julia Lisella’s books include Always (WordTech Editions, 2014), Terrain (WordTech Editions, 2007), and a chapbook, Love Song Hiroshima (Finishing Line Press, 2004). She is a professor of English at Regis College, and co-curates the Italian American Writers Association (IAWA) Reading Series in Boston. Her newest collection, Our Lively Kingdom, was named a finalist for the Lauria/Frasca Prize and will be published by Bordighera Press in the fall of 2022.
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