Two Poems by Thomas Dedola
Verona
I left my body in one of the vicoli ciechi near a large lime-green dumpster in a wet July in Verona. I left my body propped against the wall, where the gravel is a splatter of black pneumonia which stains the bin man’s boots. And I made my way out, into the town centre, past grey faces forming a hesitant queue, melting their way into the cultural death camp of the Arena. Nearby, families take great care to paint on smiles as grinning with joy they haemorrhage love, and look for answers at the bottom of a seafood salad. The day gets lost in a wet cough, as we all run out of borrowed time to waste. Words gasp for air. It must be the humidity. I will see how far I can walk away without a body, until the wind catches up and, like a dead friend’s hand, leads me back inside.
Santa Maria delle Stelle
Smart shoes, cheap tears, expensive bleach: the doctor makes his rounds, that routine chore on rotting shadows. Halogen lights frame brittle skin, sandpaper flesh as the space screams DECAY. In hospital bays they lie, tattered advertisements for perpetual inevitability. Perhaps they relish their stagnation – too weak to move, too weak to smile, too weak to throw caution to the wind. On any given Monday, the doctor watches a man erode under a neon moon. Life is fleeting, but death is unremitting – it just keeps going on behind nondescript doors where visiting relatives haunt the wards and the miasma of life first rises then seeps into cracked walls. The doctor makes his rounds, as forms inhaling and exhaling count down the minutes till lunch.
Thomas Dedola is an Italian poet and short story writer, currently based in Cambridge, UK. His work has been published in Felan, Panoplyzine, Cathexis Northwest Press, the Poetry Kit, and Egg+Frog.