BOTH SIDES NOW, or THE THREE D’S

by Maria Lisella

Smoke rises following an Israeli bombardment in the Gaza Strip, as seen from southern Israel, on Dec. 16, 2023. (AP via Arab News)

"The plumes of smoke from tanks, artillery and the planes of the air force will continue to cover the sky over the Gaza Strip until we will achieve our goals," Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said. —NPR, January 21, 2024

Destruction, displacement, death;

the toll soars past 28,000 on one side
1,400 on the other; hostages by the
hundreds spark nonstop defiant
 
statements from the father whose
tech savvy son posts incendiary
messages from the warm rays
of the Florida sun. Like father, like son,
 
they ignite destruction, displacement, death.
Brethren in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Yemen
rise to actions of the heart mind: force
meeting force, clamoring to save and
 
sacrifice sons, daughters. More destruction,
displacement, death. Deaf to calls for a ceasefire
postwar plans promising a two-state solution,
they focus only on Israel’s future credit rating.  
 
Standing Together, Jews and Palestinians post:
“We are aching, all of us… It seems we are
not allowed to hurt for both.”
Now is the moment, “to hurt for both.”

Maria Lisella is the sixth Queens Poet Laureate and an American Academy Fellow; her work includes Thieves in the Family (NYQ Books), Amore on Hope Street (Finishing Line Press) and Two Naked Feet (Poets Wear Prada). She is a member of the Thursday Morning Poets, Brevitas and co-curates the Italian American Writers Assoc. literary readings.

HAIL, MARY

by Maria Lisella

Buon giorno, buen dia Maria

Full of grace and wisdom and power

The Lord may be with thee, and you

May be Blessed among women but

 

What about the children? Not the one

In the womb that has been consecrated

As the son of God, but God, your god,

My god has many sons, daughters all

 

Around the world. They are not all blessed

Some are cursed and lost and under a pile

Of rubble in Ukraine, Yemen, Israel, Palestine, Gaza;

Others live in the darkness of the blind, are

 

Plagued by hallucinations, cursed with spasms

Of a mind that plays tricks on them all day, all

Night. Imagine a predator behind you, in your

Shadow, silent, stealthy, looking over your shoulder

 

Or under your bed. You cannot see but you know

They are there and they mean you harm for no

Other reason than you are where you find yourself

Not for an act you perpetrated on someone else,

 

Just for being who you are. The luck of the draw?

And Holy Mary, Mother of God, do you pray for

The innocent as well as the sinners? The pilots,

The soldiers firing artillery rockets, are they too

 

Prayed for? Rockets with ranges of 30-50 miles, fired

In barrages for the most effect, the most damage.

Are they too in your prayers to god and which god

Might that be? What does that God look like, what

 

Does that god think, plan, why does that god never

intervene? Humans shooting hate and rockets blindly

into Ashkelon, Beersheba, under the eyes of Israeli 

drones … range is crucial for rockets, for prayers too.

 

Pray for us sinners and for the innocent, for my own son

Living in a world plagued with demons he cannot see

or touch or hear but knows they are there, so music

and words come to him as if a shaft of light in day

 

Or night, raises his voice above the din in his brain, to

Feel the lift above the iron dome of paranoia, the upsurge

Of spirits that haunt, and fly, and invade his small cot in an

Institution with cinder block walls, netted windows he can’t

 

See but knows they are there: the limitations, the lack

Of liberty, the outside in; the other sons and daughters

in Gaza, or Yemen or Ukraine are bombarded with a panoply

of air power used in a steadily escalating series of attacks.

 

What I wish for my own son is comfort, warmth, knowing

There is a meal, a roof over his head, a dog at his feet, a

Sun he can feel but not see… Mother of God, what do you

Wish for your sons, your daughters now and at the hour

 

Of their deaths? When will your god hear your pleas or

Have the mothers and daughters been silenced to the

Tunnels, the basements, the streets, have they lost their

Voices, their powers to heal, now and at the hour of now?

Maria Lisella is the sixth Queens Poet Laureate and an American Academy Fellow; her work includes Thieves in the Family (NYQ Books), Amore on Hope Street (Finishing Line Press) and Two Naked Feet (Poets Wear Prada). She is a member of the Thursday Morning Poets, Brevitas and co-curates the Italian American Writers Assoc. literary readings.

YOKO LEAVES THE DAKOTA

by Maria Lisella

Yoko Ono’s WishTree at the Museum of Modern Art, 1996.
UK’s Daily Mail broke the story last month of Yoko’s leaving New York City.

… to raise cows on a 600-acre farm

she & Beatles legend John Lennon

purchased 45 years ago, outfitting it

with a herd of 122 cows and 10 bulls …

a dream to live on land as his father did

 

with no plans of returning

 

their attempt to create new lives,

away from crowds, smog, love-ins

and the ceaseless need to be THEM

on West 72 St.—until 1980–

shot in the Dakota archway, Lennon fell

on the feast of the Immaculate Conception

 

with no plans of returning

 

Outdistancing his dad, 47-year old Sean

pushes wheel-chair bound Yoko

from stage to stage, celebrity galas;

she perches alone on the Marcellus Shale

plateau, protests “fracking” for the rest of us,

no longer hibernates in the sprawling Dakota

 

with no plans of returning

 

Controversial, she lived, starved

through World War II,

like a modern-day Eve, gossipy fans

blamed her for breaking up Camelot… 

she offered them her “wish tree” series.

Now widowed 50 years, at 90,

it is as if she has lived 400 years

 

with no plans of returning

Maria Lisella is the sixth Queens Poet Laureate and an Academy of American Poets Fellow. Twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize, her collections include: Thieves in the Family (NYQ Books), Amore on Hope Street (Finishing Line Press) and Two Naked Feet (Poets Wear Prada). Forthcoming is The Man with a Plan.

THE CALL

by Maria Lisella

The call came

A three-story roof,

not a big building

serious enough

to break bones.

A day later,

another call comes.

A room

at Jacobi.

 

I plan.

He drives.

I’m the passenger.

She’ll be there, you know.

I know, I hear myself say,

the mother is always there.

 

I hate

the stereotype, but it fits.

The mother takes him back.

He doesn’t get better.

He never leaves except

this way.

 

The cycle—failure,

salvation, failure,

a passive remote control.

Patched up.

Lateral moves

ward to ward.

Suicide watch.

 

From the parameter,

I watch.

Stepmother

not blood

not natural.

Despair respects no borders

legal, illegal.

 

You love what you touch,

love more what touches you.

Maria Lisella is the recipient of a Poet Laureate Fellowship from the American Academy of Poets and the author of Thieves in the Family (NYQ Books), Amore on Hope Street (Finishing Line Press) and Two Naked Feet (Poets Wear Prada). She co-curates the Italian American Writers Association readings and is a travel writer by trade.

I TAKE NOTES

by Maria Lisella

I take notes … 

… on my iPhone as if it were a reporter’s notebook, efficient and cool.

Detached, my voice raises itself to inquire to questions I already know the answers to, skull-filed so many decades ago for future reference.

Reams of notes record incidents: calls to 911, a tossed chair, hunger strikes, “behavioral” issues they call them, I surmise when he can no longer tolerate

The cinderblock walls, the fenced-in windows, the odors of bleach and Pine Sol and alcohol, the wails and wants of other residents looking for a way home.

This time I even suggest sedation, but before that, attention.

In this pandemic his thwarted life has shrunk to Lilliputian size—no socializing in the  halls, no dance or music classes or current events discussions—no smoking on the deck on cool nights.

Just this: a metal-framed cot-like bed with his poppy-printed gleeful sheets he received for Christmas to remind him he is special after all.

Apart from the rest, for he gets company and kisses and snacks and cigars, jeans and peanuts, Irish Spring soap and coconut shampoo.

He smells like a tropical breeze, is clean and fresh all day long.

He withdraws from the halls to the sounds of the Greek language as his blind fingers make love to Alexa and he mouths the words of a country he dreams of but will never see.

Maria Lisella is the recipient of a Poet Laureate Fellowship from the American Academy of Poets; she co-curates the Italian American Writers Association readings and is a travel writer by trade.

A STITCH IN...

by Maria Lisella

Tell clothing brands to support workers by signing the Transparency Pledge. The vast majority of workers do not know whom to turn to for improving their working conditions because the brands they make clothes for are kept secret. This lack of transparency allows brands to avoid accountability and fuels abuses against workers. Transparency benefits workers—they can inform brands when they experience labor abuses. Transparency also helps brands—they can better take steps to stop and prevent labor abuses. Currently, 40 companies have committed to the Transparency Pledge, but hundreds continue to hide where they make their clothes. Workers and shoppers deserve to know where brands make their clothes. This shopping season, call on American Eagle Outfitters, Armani, Carrefour and URBN (Urban Outfitters, Free People, Anthropologie, Nuuly) to support workers by publishing a list of all factories that make their branded products. —Human Rights Watch

It required a stitch or two and so I tacked it
the two tabs that were sticking out
of her cheap striped shirt—
made in Bangladesh reads the label
where women who know nothing
about raised fists of labor united or
the IWW, or the AFL-CIO, sweat
for 14 hours a day, and 35 cents an hour
turn out shirts just like this one stitched
with labels that read: H&M, Calvin Klein,
Ann Taylor, Zara, Target and, yet,
when a factory goes up in flames or
crumbles to the ground in New Delhi,
Bangladesh, Ahmedabad, collapsing
into tangles of steel, concrete blocks,
mortar, or fizzle in flames, the label-owners
deny those women have ever
been making their products and those
women have nothing to do with their
$2.4 trillion dollars in profits.


Maria Lisella is the outgoing Queens Poet Laureate and a newly-named fellow of the American Academy of Poets; she is a travel writer by trade.

THEY DON'T REMEMBER WHEN WE WERE . . .

by Maria Lisella

… the immigrants, the sharecroppers,
the unskilled laborers standing on corners
waiting for work, maybe it was the Hell’s Gate Bridge
or the dangerous bowels of the subways.

Sharing low-lit tenements with men piled high
swapping pillows, sheets and beds as they returned
from the morning shift, the evening shift

The stench of those men-filled quarters
No women to dress for, to clean for,
to shave for, a society of men clammy

in winters, sultry in summers, saving
meager wages split with padroni
and landlords, before sending bits and pieces

Home to bring wives and children
here to this foreign place, trying
to remember why they left home,

Was it that bad? Yes it was, wives don’t tell
the men in their letters, of the famine,
the deaths, a silk thread of hope spanning

The Atlantic, to feel whole again
not so alone, to be human instead
of imitating animals in the daily routine:

Wake, work, sleep, nothing in between
no rises or falls or celebrations or
clean towels or bread on the table

Set for four, six or set at all.
Eating while standing becomes a skill
on the corners waiting for the work

If the policeman doesn’t move them
to another corner, stepping into strangers’
cars, a dangerous deal for a day’s work

Now the men speak with accents from:
Mexico, Guyana, India but they are not
so different from our grandfathers and uncles

Shifting from one foot to the other to keep warm
expecting a day’s pay by nightfall, but who can tell?
they have no choice.

My mother recalls the stories of her father, brothers.
She cannot understand the nieces, nephews
who don’t see their ancestors’ faces before them.

Maria Lisella is the sixth Queens Poet Laureate 2015-2018. Twice nominated for a Pushcart Poetry Prize, her collections include Thieves in the Family, Amore on Hope Street, and Two Naked Feet. She co-curates the Italian American Writers Association readings, is a NY Expert for USA TODAY, and contributes to La Voce di New York.

OUR DATE

by Maria Lisella

Skittles-covered Bicycle. Image source: Foodbeast.

My stepson spent
the afternoon in detention
for lying to a nun.

I told them my name means
pheasants in Italian,
but no one believed me.

Half white, half Puerto Rican,
Italian last name, nappy hair,
said otherwise.

At the perfect age of 10,
my stepson and I
had a date one afternoon.

Determined to teach him to fly,
forget nuns, divorced parents,
over-protective mother,

or, just ride a bike.
A two-wheeler, banana seat,
shiny, chrome, bells, streamers.

He’d run alongside it
throw one leg far and wide
in time to find the pedal

on the other side.
I clutched the back of the seat
sent him off as far as I could.

Like my father did for me,
knowing spills and harm
would follow.

Years later,
a knot in my heart,
his dusty, tear-smeared face

lips quivering, telling me
of a quick ride to Pelham Bay
where he was chased down

by taunts of "You don’t belong here."
            I tried to tell them my name
            but no one listened.

I think of all I don’t know
about courage ­– how to build it,
pass it on, when to fight, to flee,

and when to leave your bike
behind, save your life,
find your way home.


Maria Lisella's Pushcart Poetry Prize-nominated work appears in Amore on Hope Street and Two Naked Feet as well as a number of journals such as Feile Festa, LIPS, Paterson Literary Review, Skidrow Penthouse and online at DanMurano.com and First Literary Review East. Her forthcoming collection, Thieves in the Family, will be published by New York Quarterly Books in 2014. She is a charter member of the online poetry circle, Brevitas and co-curates the Italian American Writers Association literary readings at Cornelia St. Cafe and Sidewalk Cafe in NYC.