LITTLE FISH

by Gil Fagiani

Around one hundred and seventy migrants who had been kept on the Italian territory of Lampedusa have been evacuated. The island’s centre had been designed to house up to 850 people for around 48 hours. However it has been steadily transformed into a long-term refugee camp, leading to accusations of crowded, unsanitary conditions. Most of the migrants are now being taken to the Italian mainland by air. Giusi Nicolini, the Mayor of Lampedusa says the system needs changing. “I believe nothing can be the same as before. The parliament, all governments and especially the Italian government must realise that we must work seriously to totally reform how we treat asylum seekers in our country,” he said. Last week video footage emerged appearing to show the refugees, some of them naked, in the freezing cold being being sprayed with disinfectant. This led to a storm of criticism. --Euronews, December 25, 2013


At the Lampedusa Welcome Center
workers are ordered to stop the scabies
epidemic among the North African detainees,
survivors of a boat capsizing that drowned
366 people off the coast of Sicily.

Cell phone footage shows workers
using a high-pressure compressor to blast
the migrants with a formula of cold water
and disinfectant. Men, women, children
huddle naked in an open-air courtyard,
rubbing their eyes, mouths gaping.

Lampedusa’s mayor sees the images,
reacts with horror, condemns the treatment
as la practica da lager—something from
a concentration camp. The workers tell
journalists who stalk them, Attenzione!
We’re just the picccoli pesci—the little fish.


Gil Fagiani is a translator, essayist, short story writer and poet. His most recent book of poetry is Serfs of Psychiatry (Finishing Line Press, 2012).  In 2014, his poetry collection Logos, set in a Bronx drug program in the 1970s, is due to be published by Guernica Editions. Gil co-curates the Italian American Writers’ Association’s monthly reading series, and is a founding member of the Vito Marcantonio Forum.

IN THE HANGAR ON LAMPEDUSA

by Lois Elaine Heckman

“The Italian authorities have so far retrieved 301 bodies from the smugglers’ boat, which caught fire and sank just a quarter-mile off the island. Of the estimated 500 people on board, only 155 survived.” --Gaia Pianigiani, New York Times, October 9, 2013

No, they are not
the undertaker’s casket samples
laid out in rows for choosing.
They are all filled with loss:
a mother and child
still connected by their cord,
a boy proudly wearing
the Italian soccer team’s t-shirt.
They hold people
who desired, searched, struggled
for a better life in another world
and found it in a different place
than they imagined.
There are more stories still
in the cemetery below,
covered by salt water,
like our faces.


Lois Elaine Heckman is from Los Angeles and now lives in Milan, Italy. She has had works published in Tilt-a-Whirl, Lighten Up Online, Prole, Yale Journal for Humanities in Medicine, Persimmon Tree, and others. She won the 2010 New England Shakespeare Festival Rubber Ducky Sonnet Contest and placed in the Poetry on the Lake Competition in 2012 and 2013, and the Hungry Hill Poetry Prize in 2012. Her chapbook, Out of Nowhere (White Violet Press), was published by Kelsay Books in 2013.