A Note from the Editor
- Issue 1:
- The Goddess by Jes Sweat
- Conversations with Jack by TheCroakingFrog
- Must write poems or I will scream by Jane Harvey
- Untitled Poem by Frances de Larminat
romance language
by
Paola Micheli
by
Paola Micheli
I’m mid order and the waiter has just left. I think both my Italian and my decision were too slow for him to care.
My ex sits across from me. We haven’t seen each other in five years and probably wouldn’t have, had his mother not died. A bag he’s brought me with a few of her things hangs off his chair. She always wished to have a daughter to steal her clothes and not just queste bestie, “these beasts,” as she called her sons.
Speaking aloud to the question of what I want to drink I say, voglio te - forgetting in the moment that voglio, “I want,” is the less polite way of saying vorrei, “I would like.”
Enzo looks at me and raises his eyebrows. Pointing to himself he asks:
Vuoi me… o vuoi un tè?
“You want me… or you want tea?”
His emphasis hangs over the article, which in Italian makes the distinction, since te can mean both “you” and “tea.”
Some years earlier I sat opposite his mother, post breakup, when she asked me:
Ti manca?
“Do you miss him?”
I look back at him now, his mother still sitting on their cream-colored couch in Rome, the two of them simultaneous, and respond: “I want tea.”