Photograph by Chelsea Graham
The market opens. A middle-aged man walks down a makeshift aisle shadowed by a crude aluminium roof. He passes other sellers putting out their wares: fruits, vegetables, cheeses, meats, bread. He settles in his usual place, between an elderly couple’s produce stand and a booth where a young man sells flowers, sometimes assisted by his brother. The middle-aged man turns two nearby crates upside down, sits on one of them and places his single box of goods, lemons, on the other.
“Limoni” calls the lemon man.
Posted in Fiction |
It was August 2009, a month which broke all records as the hottest Michigan summer in years. I lived in a basement bedroom with my boyfriend, in a house with broken air conditioning and a clan of mohawked, band-t-shirt-wearing guys. As northerners unaccustomed to too much sun, we spent days lounging in the basement, where windowless cement walls trapped the cool air. Next to the TV, the rickety floor fan buffeted us with lukewarm air, ruffling my hair but never quite drying my sweat-soaked skin.
When the sun started setting I usually watched the guys shoot off fireworks from the patio, or we crowded into the kitchen to drink. The table was perpetually dirty with cigarette ash and scarred with stab wounds from various weapons, and each morning after long nights of drinking, I cleared sticky glasses off the table and wiped it down with a colorless rag. One such evening, Pat showed up at the house with a rectangular package wrapped in white paper. He dropped it on the grimy counter with a sickening thud.
“Meat,” he announced.
Posted in Creative Nonfiction |
He sits there, ripe on the vine,
Vying for attention,
Red against green.
Like a communist, he sits.
His red skin screams,
“Choose me, you fool, choose me!”
I decide he needs to ripen more;
“Until next time, my Marxist friend”
My fingers apologetically say.
He sits there on the vine,
An impotent Bolshevik.
Posted in Poetry |
An Onion is
The crème de la crème
Of all avant-garde
Dishes;
New and old
In these kitchens.
It’s the prominent
Pearl in
A French Onion Soup.
Transparent
Chopped
Sliced or diced,
Her layers unfold
Like a fleur-de-lis.
Half petals
Or cubed,
It perfumes
Like a parade of
Frenchmen on line at the Louvre.
Slippery time
The pan sizzles,
Soft stench.
Like Monet’s
Madame Gaudibert,
Her dress
Complicated
Hard and thick.
She’ll make you cry–
Or even sick.
The people will say,
“She’s bitter raw to the core”
Run quick!
Sharp to the eye,
Sweet like
Coco Chanel,
The onion waits
At the market like a
Malevolent
Mademoiselle.
Posted in Poetry |
Oh honey–
Natural and rich
An ingredient used in
Almost every religious dish.
Internationally different,
The world begins to weather.
Honey is the only thing
To bring us back together.
Verona’s romantic dose;
Spoonful of Romeo and Juliet;
Red wine regret, young lover’s fret;
Catholic sweet rose,
Coating the throat
Of the Italian Opera singer’s
Lasting note.
Apple slices dipped raw;
Must be Rosh Hashanah.
Sweet tooth feast,
Straws of delight
Usher in the New Year just right.
Hinduism’s key addition;
Melting pot of health;
Medical serenity;
The happiness for eternity
Mixed
Bittersweet potion
For immortality.
The festival of Madhu Purnima
A gift of peace.
That Buddha saw
Disciple’s disagreement;
Left alone, one man’s retreat;
A monkey’s selfless largesse
To bring everyone together for peace.
A virtue available,
Natural and fresh,
Heeling the wounded flesh
In Islam.
It’s nutritious;
Stories of holy medicine
Helping and delicious.
Religion is said to be the reason for wars.
The world separates, rain pours,
We disagree.
But if we could all stop
For a second, to see
The solution is in a spoonful of honey.
Posted in Poetry |
O Scorpion! Venomous sting that killed my lover!
How I despise you, yet am fascinated…
For how do you trek across such desert heat?
Your hard shell like the armor of a soldier,
Masking the vulnerable interior flesh.
You scan the horizon,
Searching for food.
Crawling slowly, your dark segments
Move in a dangerously diligent way.
O how I loathe your crooked tail –
Steeped in venom and murderous rage.
Yet you dance delicately, as if the sting
Was no fault of your own.
You cross the scorching sand,
Baby clinging tightly to your back,
Shielded from the wind and brutal heat.
Your shell – red with the sun’s unwanted glare –
Protects you from my crushing fist.
Sharp pincers crush, and yet drag you down.
Their weight restricts you,
You’ll never be free.
O how I hate your small body.
Your blind smile haunts my sleep,
But still, I am fascinated by you,
Tiny,
Majestic,
Ruler of the sand.
Posted in Poetry |
On all fours, a 12 year old boy slowly and meticulously scrubs the kitchen floor. The square tiles, approximately 10×10, had originally been a pale pink/salmon color with faint twirls. This is slowly becoming apparent to the sweating boy who scours the tiles then rings out his rag in a bucket filled with water that is now as black as the grit contaminating the majority of the floor. He is alone and it is his first time cleaning. The boy’s dad is at his new job and won’t be back for hours. His mother and sisters no longer live with the boy and his father. The boy’s parents are newly divorced.
The task has taken most of the morning and was initiated by their over-caring neighbor who came to see how the bachelors were faring. She was not impressed. “Take a rag and get down and scrub the hell outta that floor honey,” she had said with a wrinkled nose. He starts to curse underneath his breath as the sweat pours down his face. She had made him feel embarrassed about their house. Her suggestion seemed like a perfectly plausible task at the time. Some spots were easier to clean than others as evidenced by the results. The boy wonders how his mother kept such a clean house if she had to do was what he was doing to the kitchen floor all the time.
He should have given their neighbor puppy eyes and had her demonstrate how to clean a kitchen floor for him. Many choice swear words later, his father returns home after stopping at the grocery store. The one item that stands out the most to the boy like a runt in a litter is the yellow mop. A look of disbelief, anger, longing, amusement, acceptance, and resignation all fight for a place on his face. He exhales a deep breath, curses one more time and begins washing the dishes with a sponge.
Posted in Fiction |
I have seen every fashion in footwear and hairstyle that humanity has ever offered. I can’t get what they have, but I will one day.
I work endlessly in the squares to obtain a meal for myself, and stake a claim on a small piece of real estate in Rome’s city center. It’s not easy to keep fed in this economy. It’s tiresome work. Not to mention the working conditions, but rain or shine you’ll find me fluttering around the tourists without workers rights or union representatives. I receive no benefits, no breaks, no holidays. So forgive me if I take a bathroom break in an inappropriate spot.
Plus it is painfully difficult to change jobs in this labor market. The economy has moved onward it seems. I remember when the postal service held us in high regard. Those days are no more; we are replaced by technology and automation like so many of the working class. Instead, I dream big and admire the ever-changing, oft-flaunted fashion of my bourgeois benefactors. They feed us crumbs and look at us with scorn. Who entertains your children? Who cleans up at your restaurants? Who brings life to an otherwise dead city? It is us – the pigeon proletariat. Forever looked down on … even when we fly above.
———
Those pompous pigeons don’t know their place in society. It is unforgivable how they think they can move into our neighborhood like some upper class cockatrice. They occupy the wrong side of town; they have no aristocratic breeding in their feather, like we do in our fur. No, we have inherited these ruins. They are from the new side of the city. They are ruins as well but they are ruins without class, no emperors walked on their cobblestones, prime ministers only tripped. Ha!
So what if some of us aristocrats have run upon hard times. We, too, in some aspects are dependent on those bourgeois behemoths but we are still noble, still respected and still impeccably well-groomed. We do not scavenge for food. We are fed or feed, as we choose, because we are the felines of the forum. Forever deserving, simply because we are what we are.
Perched in the sun, among cafes and catacombs, the good times and bad. We will always have our poise and our pride. We will forever rule the ruins. The sophisticate’s Rome.
Posted in Fiction |
There is something about this city that is enchanted. It is almost as if the city’s millennia of citizens are quietly humming in your ear, along with the sound of traffic, soothing the frustrations of the day. They use the cobbles stones to playfully trip you as you hurry for the bus.
Sitting in the forum under the sun they glare at you until you blush so deeply that it lasts for a fortnight and you call it sunburn.
When you walk down a crumbling, antiquated path, they wave their togas to direct the pigeons in your direction. Methodically aiming them to make you twist away from the flying, feathered spear tips.
Trained by the greatest centurion tacticians, they await the perfect moment to pounce and swiftly blow on your brightly colored lighter so that it is manifestly more difficult to ignite your cigarette.
They poke and prod your back as you climb the steps on which Caesar was stabbed, tickling your vertebrae, but you blame it on your backpack.
I have sometimes wondered if I were to count the shadows in a crowd, would I find a deviation? Would there be an outline out of place and time? I am perhaps too nervous to notice or maybe I would rather not demystify the magic.
The fae of the forum revel in our romantic recollections of Rome. It is their finest feat of deception–so tantalizing that I believe it is true.
Posted in Creative Nonfiction |
Via Sant’Agata dei Goti
(Is more than a mouthful)
What delightful “g”s,
cobbled and winding,
satisfying the phantom
nostalgia
to modern day;
what Rome may
(or might) have been.
All grasping ivy, grey stone, mustard walls,
not a soul on that street;
all closed doors,
except one;
and
almost at the end
a man who repairs anything you need and has whatever you don’t.
Posted in Poetry |
My first morning in Paris. It was seven o’clock on a Sunday in March and it was raining. I walked from my hotel in the Latin Quarter across the river to the right bank. Everyone had always told me that I had to go to the Marais. I stopped in front of a window at semi-open bakery, the shopkeeper just unlocking the door for the day. Dozens of tinted macaroons lined the bakery window shelves, and the rain, falling down in heavy sheets across the glass, made me think of one of Monet’s watercolor canvases. The pigments of the tiny cookies blended wonderfully with one another, creating a street side masterpiece.
I had dreamed of this moment since I was three and wished my mother could’ve been standing next to me on the Rue des Rosiers. Even if it was cold and I was completely soaked. From my mother was born my love for two things French: pastries and Impressionist artists. I knew about Cezanne, Renoir and Gauguin long before I had ever heard the names Cinderella or Snow White. Since my mother is an artist, I spent my whole life I surrounded by paints and brushes, calligraphy ink and imported paper that smelled of faraway places.
She and I used to sit on a bench in front of her store in downtown La Jolla and share a croissant—I loved the soft, light-as-air middle, and she always ate my leftovers, the crusts. Those days in my memory are always sunny, the Pacific Ocean made of billions of shimmering sapphires dancing along the horizon in the distance, and my mother, perfectly frozen at 35, always wearing her favorite Florentine printed sundress. “One day Miss Kate,” she would say “we will be doing this in Paris.”
My mother had dreams of traveling the world, but the farthest she ever got was Morelia, Mexico, where she lived for a year as an art student when she was 20. After returning she met a man who she thought she could travel and spend her life with and married him. Seven years later she had two children, a beautiful home in South Pasadena (she still hadn’t left California) and an absent husband. After filing for divorce she found a job as a graphic designer and moved on, taking her two boys with her. She was a single mother for six years before she met my father on a bench along Pacific Coast Highway in Laguna Beach.
Within four years both my brother and I were born. At the time my father was a writer, which allowed him to stay at home with my brother and me, but it didn’t allow for a very steady income. So my mom opened a snobby stationary store in downtown La Jolla and kept working. My mom closed her store when my oldest brother was diagnosed with a brain tumor. I was almost four and even I could see how it changed everything. I remember walking into the hospital room where Jacob was resting before his surgery. My mother stood by his tiny bed; she looked so tall and strong that day. I was so proud that she was my mother. The best gift I ever received was for my fourth birthday on February 14, 1995 when Jacob came home from the hospital. I don’t remember ever seeing my mother happier than that night.
After the store closed, my dad started working, and our family became quite mobile. In every new city we moved to my mom and I would find a new bakery in the area to frequent, which had to fill one criterion—it must make croissants. There was Belen Artesian Bakers in Escondido, Four Sisters in Wailuku, Le Petit in Baltimore, The Secret Garden in the San Fernando Valley. It was our thing, something about her that I never had to share with my brothers.
But the older I got, the less enjoyable it became. Our sleepy afternoons in the garden with tea turned into slamming doors and fights; she and my father screaming at each other. The kinds of things that happen to married people when they’ve been together for a while, the things that make being at home uncomfortable and awkward. I could tell that they just stopped loving each other. I remember how I used to lock myself in my room for hours, but my bedroom door was just never quite thick enough to drown out the yelling. I used to stare at the maps pinned on my walls, the ones my mother so carefully hung, imagining myself somewhere else really far away. I blamed my mother for all of it: for being too needy, for spending too much money, for making my father so mad.
When I told my mother that I was moving to Europe, she was so happy. She kept hugging me and kissing me and saying, “I’m so proud of you Miss Kate, you’ve become so much better than I could’ve ever imagined.” Later that night I walked by her bedroom. My dad was out of town on business, Dubai I believe. I could hear her sobs through the door.
It was difficult to leave but I convinced myself that it was my life, the point where I had to let my parents be my parents, let them work it out and that they had to let me move on without them. My mom helped me pack all of my things, photos of my brothers and our home in Maui. When she wasn’t looking I snuck a picture of my parents in my bag, the only one I ever had of them. They’re at a dinner party; the shimmering lights in the background make me think that it must’ve been Christmas. My father is looking into the camera, trying to hold back a smile, but failing. And my mother, so in love, is kissing him on the cheek. When I landed at London Heathrow airport, I took that picture out of my suitcase, folded it three times and stuck it in my wallet.
When I found myself finally standing in the Marais, finally in Paris, finally staring at actual perfect French pastries, I took out that photo of my parents and thought of what I had left to get to this moment. This was the dream that my mother had given me.
Posted in Creative Nonfiction |
Click the link below to read a full text version of “Robert and Jane” by Melanie Pisano, Alex Sexton and Rory Westerman.
Robert and Jane by Melanie Pisano, Alex Sexton and Rory Westerman
Posted in Screenplay |
Click the link below to read a full text version of “For Emily” by Nicholas Bartolone
Posted in Screenplay |
“I had a dream again, Laz, about us.” Wisps of knotted black hair floated around her face, intertwined in long emerald and turquoise earrings, and her glazed-over eyes set on a high tree marking the edge of the earth. They sat leaning against the building, legs uncrossed.
Posted in Fiction | Tagged Micro-fiction |
I leapt from the dock and lightning flashed, freezing me inches from the water that churned with the energy of the coming storm. Then it was gone and I plunged into the warm August lake. My red dress swirled around me, grabbing at bare legs and waving arms as I climbed back to the surface. My head broke through and I gasped as Andy soared from the dock, his legs seeming to climb up, up and over me and then down into the water at my back. He surfaced at my side and we climbed the ladder onto the dock before launching ourselves once again. We dropped below the waves, hurtling toward the lake’s floor before slowing to a gentle drift. More lightning filtered down from above, illuminating an empty green landscape and Andy’s eyes on mine.
Posted in Fiction | Tagged Short Story |
Scientists think they have it all
Figured out because they use
Figures and rules, but
Empiricism fails to maintain the
Constructs of either
Validity or
Reliability
When it can’t apply to every situation,
Thus proving that the objective
Is subjective.
Posted in Poetry |
Cars passed on Main Street, down rough concrete the county never had money to fix after winter frost turned it to shit. Parked between a large oak tree and a family owned grocery store, a young cop shot radar. Each car passed at exactly 25 miles per hour.
Posted in Fiction | Tagged Micro-fiction |
Click the link below to read a full text version of “Dunk Kings” by Alex Bronnenkant
Posted in Screenplay |
It’s been two weeks
Your scent is still
stuck to my linens.
Some day soon
I’ll get around to washing them.
Posted in Poetry |
The American University of Rome 
