Featured Poet





Morgan Richards

( West Virginia )

The wine I drank on an empty stomach
has conjured up
my thickest Appalachian,
making communication with the Sicilian 
all the more difficult since
we are both speaking 
bastardized English,
and I am falling asleep on the dance floor,
woozy from the wine and sightseeing.

He says I am thinking too much
and not moving near enough.
I ask him if I’ve spoilt
his evening.  His face screws
into confusion until I can come up 
with a translation: ruint for spoilt, 
then ruined for ruint.  Ah, he says.
No no no, and kisses me again
and again, which, admittedly, 
is not too objectionable 
in the context of ignorance
and blaring American music
and bottles clinking like teeth.

I am already so eager to learn.
Better to spend my lips on him 
than the struggle to converse.
After all, when two tongues 
come so close together,
language barriers disperse
into the taste of salt and Italian cigarettes,
allowing raw cultural exchange to occur, 
an educational experience 
I had not anticipated,
but in many ways prefer.  
Besides, as the Sicilian keeps reminding me,
this is my last night here.  
In a few more hours, I’ll be gone.  

The View from Giotto’s Tower

Sure, it’s easier to appreciate this view
when you can’t see any of the men or women below you, 
the ones winning and losing and yearning and dying—
all of them, all the time, none rising above any other 
for very long.  It is much easier to appreciate 
what’s been built up beautifully 
when you can’t see what’s been torn down,
which is to say, you can’t perceive the lives 
that are not being lived  as yours is now, 
which is above the rest, full 
of wonder and thanks to God 
for all that exists
and as little concern as possible 
for what does not, or, more poignantly, 
what you cannot and do not wish to see.  
The desire for this view 
is the foundation of this city, 
and for most places everywhere.  
You need not climb the 414 steps 
to the top of Giotto’s Tower 
to achieve this vista.  
You can blind yourself at street level, 
gliding along on the legs the beggars 
do not have.  You can gape 
at the gold-plated ceiling 
of St. John’s Baptistry
while the gypsy woman 
in the doorway canters 
for the few copper coins 
she keeps clinking, clinking.
The rays of light breaking so gloriously
through those distant clouds 
are shining just as brightly
on the monuments of the dead 
as they are the houses of the living.  
And who is to say one is not the other?  
Listen, poet, life is no panoramic view.  
The bells are tolling, and the dark tower 
beckons.  You must return.  You must descend, 
letting the old stones press cold against you
all the way down. 

Transition

Pictures of uncommon nature, painted by the Master’s hand
Draw me ever on life’s journey, rendered thus to understand.
                –Reeltime Travelers, “As a Songbird That Has Fallen”

Her childhood set like the sun that evening:
one solitary star bleeding into a field of Tuscan poppies.
She watched herself from the train, watched herself sink 
into the violet pall, unsure of what would come with the next dawn
or the next.  Perhaps another light would rise to illuminate 
what the child had done.  What a mess she’d made, pretending 
to know right from wrong, guarding the sanctuary of her body, 
her soul, driving her demons away.
Then Florence and Sienna and Venice and Rome.
Chaos appeared as the pecking pile of pigeons
in the Piazza San Marco, each individual bird
one concession, then another, the mass of them
overwhelming.  Then the rain falling in Rome, 
demure as she, and as inviting.  She found
herself wandering through the mazes of streets, 
searching for someone or something familiar, 
some reminder of home.  She found none.  
Not in the glass shops or the wine 
or the masks she tried on.  Not in the discotech
or the Uffizi or the Sistine Chapel.
There were no labeled arrows,
no tourist maps for the canals of the self,
no familial guideposts.  Every time the Cathedral bells tolled,
her inhibitions scattered like the birds of Sienna.
She was, for the first time, truly on her own,
with newborn eyes that could not yet see 
the tortures lying in bed with liberation.
What she could perceive that evening
was one distant mountain, fading with resignation, 
just as she was, shade by shade.

____________________


Morgan Richards, who grew up in the Ohio Valley region of West Virginia, is a graduate student in English at West Virginia University. Her poems have appeared previously in Nantahala Review.