3 Poems by Daniela Buccilli

3 Poems 

by Daniela Buccilli

Mulberry Street, NYC, ca.1900

These three poems are part of a poetry manuscript called Forestiera (“Foreign Woman”) which looks at a fascist internment policy and the current American immigration policy. I had been reading about the policy that affected the Italian valley where I was born, then America put children and other asylum seekers in cages, and the parallels became obvious.

In addition, I needed to process the fact that so many people with Italian last names were supporting these actions. Giuliani, Scaramucci, Pompeo, Cuccinelli, Arpaio, Conway (DiNatale). How could they be anti-immigration? Maybe I shouldn't have been surprised: Italy is the inventor of fascism, the system that binds. Also, Italian culture along with its diaspora comes from the first Western imperial culture. The mafioso trope is the current aesthetic of choice.

For a long time, I have been frustrated with how American pop culture likes to see Italian immigration: there is no discussion of Italian racism against the South, for instance, or its legacy of serfdom, poverty, or fascism. There is never an acknowledgment of how many Italian American women fight patriarchy, and at what cost. So I wrote a series of poems about the performance of Italian-American-ism in Pittsburgh and on the national stage. I want to complicate stereotypes. These are three from that effort.

--Daniela Buccilli

Performing Italian-American 2

I heard it in the poem about the son who carries the Virgin Mary up the stairs.

A particular way to honor the mother: love as a cultural flavor.

We all felt it when our uncle lifted his mother-in-law,

the morphine port still attached to her chest wall,

laid her back on the bed, straightened the nightgown.

At the procession, six church elders march beside a painted dray

with a statue of a mother holding the baby god in her lap.

They walk as if defending her, the ceramic Christ & the dollar bills.

They know it looks cheap & pagan, demand solemnity, anyway.

Miss Little Italy balances her crown as she walks with her mother

to the festival tent. The mother's face, firm as a gun.

Something about her chin & sunglasses, the knee brace over the jeans

that I know she knows some cretin is always around the corner,

about to say something smart.

She holds a Styrofoam clamshell marked with sauce at its rims.

Like a smacked mouth.

The Dead War

What is it about being the youngest

that makes Chris Cuomo touchy

when the voice off-camera

calls him 'Fredo?

Is it really The Godfather's fault?

What's wrong with being the elf counselor,

Violetta's lover in La Traviata?

Is the name an ethnic slur?

How about his threat to throw

the guy down the stairs?

Just something he says instead of

what he means: I am not weak.

I am not weak. I am not weak.

It looks like he's fighting a personal war

but it's always the same war, the one

that the dead expect us to finish.

Italian Countryside

Because the mountains start in my uncle's yard.

Because someone keeps changing my edits

on the Wikipedia page for the village I mean.

Because the shepherds are in communication

with the complaining sheep.

Because I wear a red sweatsuit, and the bees

think I am a flower.

Because there's a campsite with turnstiles,

a knotted cluster of boulders, a place

where a Camel's pack fits into a crevice.

Because the red & white cardboard softens

inside thinning plastic, and the sun degrades it.

Because on the switchback path, a pack of wild dogs

runs above me. I say to the woods, Bear!

Because a half wall leads to a bar in a hillside,

where cigarettes light the night like tiny lampposts,

where silhouettes of couples

serve as spiky finials on a garden gate.

Because I show Wendy

where a stranger once raped me,

where otherwise

I might have met a friend.

Daniela Buccilli's poetry chapbook is What it Takes to Carry (Main Street Rag). Her poems can be found in Coal River Review, Paterson Literary Review, Cimarron Review, Cider Press Review, and Italian Americana. She holds degrees in teaching and writing from Penn State, University of Pittsburgh, and Carlow University. She has co-edited an upcoming anthology Show Us Your Papers. She teaches high school.