USA

mariagillan@msn.com
http://www.pccc.cc.nj.us/poetry

AFTER SCHOOL ON ORDINARY DAYS 

After school on ordinary days we listened
To The Shadow and The Lone Ranger                                 
As we gathered around the tabletop radio
that was always kept on the china cabinet
built into the wall in that tenement kitchen,
a china cabinet that held no china, except
cups and saucers, thick and white
and utilitarian, poor people’s cups
from the 5&10 cents store.

My mother was always home
from Ferraro’s Coat factory
by the time we walked in the door
after school on ordinary days,
and she’d give us milk with Bosco in it
and cookies she’d made that weekend.
The three of us would crowd around the radio,
listening to the voices that brought a wider world
into our Paterson apartment. Later

we’d have supper at the kitchen table,
the house loud with our arguments
and laughter. After supper on ordinary
days, our homework finished, we’d play
monopoly or gin rummy, the kitchen
warmed by the huge coal stove, the wind
outside rattling the loose old windows, 

we inside, tucked in, warm and together,
on ordinary days that we didn’t know
until we looked back across a distance
of forty years would glow and shimmer
in memory’s flickering light.

GROWING UP ITALIAN 

When I was a little girl,
I thought everyone was Italian,
and that was good.  We visited
our aunts and uncles,
and they visited us.
The Italian language smooth
and sweet in my mouth.

In kindergarten, English words fell on me,
thick and sharp as hail.  I grew silent,
the Italian word balanced on the edge
of my tongue and the English word, lost
during the first moment
of every question. 

It did not take me long to learn
that olive‑skinned people were greasy
and dirty.  Poor children were even dirtier.
To be olive‑skinned and poor was to be dirtiest of all.

Almost every day
Mr. Landgraf called Joey
a "spaghetti bender:"
I knew that was bad.
I tried to hide
by folding my hands neatly
on my desk and
being a good girl.

Judy, one of the girls in my class,
had honey‑blonde hair and blue eyes.
All the boys liked her.  Her parents and
grandparents were born in America.
They owned a local tavern.
When Judy's mother went downtown
she brought back coloring books and candy.
When my mother went downtown, she brought back
one small brown bag with a towel or a sheet in it.

The first day I wore my sister's hand‑me‑down coat,
Isabelle said "That coat looks familiar.  Don't
I recognize that coat?" I looked at the ground.

When the other children brought presents
for the teacher at Christmas, embroidered silk
handkerchiefs and "Evening in Paris"  perfume,
I brought dishcloths made into a doll.

I read all the magazines that told me
why blondes have more fun,
described girls whose favorite color was blue.
I hoped for a miracle that would turn my dark skin light,
that would make me pale and blonde and beautiful.

So I looked for a man
with blond hair and blue eyes
who would blend right in,
and who'd give me blond, blue‑eyed children
who would blend right in
and a name that could blend right in
and I would be melted down
to a shape and a color
that would blend right in,
till one day, I guess I was 40 by then,
I woke up cursing
all those who taught me
to hate my dark, foreign self, 

and I said, "Here I am ‑
with my olive‑toned skin
and my Italian parents,
and my old poverty,
real as a scar on my forehead,"

and all the toys we couldn't buy
and all the words I didn't say,
all the downcast eyes
and folded hands
and remarks I didn't make
rise up in me and explode.

onto paper like firecrackers
                                            like meteors
and I celebrate
                      my Italian American self,
rooted in this, my country, where
all those black/brown/red/yellow
olive‑skinned people
soon will raise their voices
and sing this new anthem: 

Here I am
            and I'm strong
            and my skin is warm in the sun
            and my dark hair shines,

and today, I take back my name
and wave it in their faces

The Black Bear On My Neighbors 
Lawn in New Jersey

In my neighbors’ front yard where one birch tree casts
its pale shadow over their small, suburban ranch house
and the grass is smooth and freshly mowed,
 
an enormous black plastic bear stands, its paws
upraised as though ready to attack,
its mouth stretched in a senseless grin.

Every year my neighbors have a garage sale
to get rid of all the knickknacks and fake
country plagues and costume jewelry
and mugs with cutsey sayings on them
that they've accumulated during the year,

Next year maybe they'll try to sell
the ersatz bear with its weird, cockeyed smile,
and maybe they'll even find someone like themselves
to buy it, one more accumulation
in a life of acquisitions.

Think of it: this plastic bear
doesn't need the wilderness
to live; it doesn't need food.
Two hundred thousand years from now,
if we let the world survive that long,
the people of  the future will find it.
Imagine how confused they'll be
as they try to figure out what use
we could have made of it,
what kind of lives we led.

LOVE POEM TO MY 
HUSBAND OF THIRTY-ONE YEARS

I watch you walk up our front path,
the entire right side of your body,
stiff and unbending, your leg,
dragging on the ground,
your arm not moving.
Six different times you ask me
the date of our daughter's wedding,
seem surprised each time,
forget who called, though you can name
obscure desert animals,
and every detail of events
that took place in 3 B.C.
You complain now of pain
in your muscles, of swimming at the Y
where a 76 year old man tells you
you swim too slowly.
I imagine a world in which
you cannot move.

Most days, I force myself to look
only into the past;
remember you, singing
and playing your guitar: "Black,
black is the color of my true love's hair,"
you sang, and each time you came into a room
how my love for you caught in my throat,
how handsome you were, how strong
and muscular, how the sun
lit your blond hair.

Now I pretend not to notice
the trouble you have buttoning
your shirt, and yes, I am terrified
and no, I cannot tell you.

The future is a murky lake.
I am afraid of the monsters
who wait just below its surface.
Even in our mahogany bed, I am not safe.
Each day, I swim toward
everything I didn't want to know.

Learning to Love Myself 

My hair is dark black and electric. Left to itself it would spring off my head in ringlets. I could never control it not when I was

growing up and it stuck out from my head like a kinky tent.
My legs are stumpy and thick, the knees swollen, the veins

protruding. My small feet are wide and my body, all of it, planted on the ground like a fat shrub , so sitting on

that high stool in the TV station I see my short, sturdy legs, my thick body that carries me along, unstoppable into my life, this 

peasant body. For years, I longed for the slender grace of a long body, tall and supple as marsh grass, but would not give 

up this incredible energy, the heat that pours from the furnace of my body, the long line of women who taught me to laugh

my deep belly laugh and grab the world in my arms and squeeze the sweetness out.

After school, Shame, and learning to love myself are form Italian Women In Black Dresses (Toronto, Canada: Guernica Editions, 2002). Reprinted by permission of the author. Growing Up Italian from Where I come from: selected and new poems (Guernica, 1995, 98). reprinted by permission of author. Other poems form Things My Mother Told Me (Guernica, 1999). Reprinted by permission of author.

© All Copyright, Maria Mazziotti Gillan.
All Rights Reserved. Printed By Permission.