Ghost House
I ran barefoot for miles to reach my mother’s beach house in Manfria. Because I wept, my oxygen saturation levels dropped.
I had to climb walls.
My husband trailed behind—yet I knew I needed to fall alone.
My mother was young, and I was old.
My estranged sister was naked, no breasts. She complained loudly she had to shower before I did, but there were no doors in the bathroom and strange men came and went. I knew from their hands that they were tombaroli--but there were no graves left to rob.
Some of us wore masks. Others didn’t.
The clarity of exile filled me, and I made a ghost house of Sicily.
Microchimeric
My mother’s cells exist within me.
My cells lived in my mother’s body, and therefore died with her, so that she is still alive, and I am already dead.
She is typing these words, and I am buried three thousand miles away.
I Entertain My Ghosts
We sip chamomile tea and nibble on caramel edibles. I tell them the weight has lifted off my head and floated to the next room.
“Go, go tend to it,” I say without words.
They nod with their eyeless heads. One by one, they stand and bend to kiss me on the forehead, then vanish beyond the French doors into the room of shadows where their hands knead and knead all my sorrows.
I am their half-blind child, adept at the language of unseeing.
Fall
On our way to the scarred perimeter of the town of our Greek ancestors, still guarded by the undefeated lone column of the temple of Athena Lindia and that beast of the oil refinery turret, I stumbled.
A stone? A bone? The whisper of a ghost annoyed by our intrusion?
My arms flung, flailed.
The men of my family watched powerless as I twirled, pulled by strings, readied to crash.
But my green-eyed daughter of the long, loose limbs stretched one arm towards my falling body. As it pirouetted across the cracked cobblestone, she brought it to a blessed halt.
I wept at the sight of the bruise that blossomed on her brave forearm.
Edvige Giunta is the author of Writing with an Accent: Contemporary Italian American Women Authors and coeditor of several anthologies, including Talking to the Girls: Intimate and Political Essays on the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, recipient of the 2023 Susan Koppelman Award for Best Anthology in Feminist Studies in American and Popular Culture and published in Italian by Iacobelli (Le ragazze della Triangle). She is Professor of English at Kean University. On Instagram @edigiunta; www.edvigegiunta.com.