Prompt 1, Week 1

Your first moment of “understanding”

The automatic doors when I step off the plane slide away

like the gates of paradiso to Dante, smooth, pneumatic,

transparent, and baffling. I think, if I don’t move, they will cut me

in half. I almost stand still. I might leave behind the legs

which pull me away from you this time, the next.

A woman and her gray mop-dog split the walkway, and my flats

slip the moss from the cobblestones. If I don’t step forward,

I’ll fall.

Iove-iove-iove—my Italian instructor’s coconut voice.

iove-iove-iove, I say in Bar Duelle later that night.

The waitress does not smile. She slips the woven placemat

under my palms, blocks my American small-talk threaded

through the Italian. The prosecco spins up bubbles from the stem

of my glass like a conch, or an ear, both deaf to the ocean inside.

Do you know where I go? I ask the concierge,

swathed in damp towels and a mushroom of sheets.

Yes, he says, and waits.

In Zeppelin, buying hot dog speckled pizza, the clerk watches me pull

five euro from my bra, and before I can ask quant’e, a woman

with a woven placemat shirt cuts in front of me. She turns, asks,

What does piato mean? and her accent pockets Big Ben, biscuits. I understand

nothing, I understand

map-making, cartography, the conquistadors

sailing full-billow, the cut

of the shovel that ripped a canal

through the land instead of going around.