Alessandra Bava

 

 

(USA)

 

 

 

Las Dos Fridas

(A Letter in Lines from Frida Kahlo to Diego Rivera)

 

Querido Diego,

even if you are gone and I am evidently split in dos halves, amidst stormy clouds, I stare at you cursing your betrayal in my Tehuana costume, holding your small portrait in my smeared hands. The white lace has been ripped open by my broken heart and pincers demand rivulets of blood that turn into exotic birds. My authenticity is my martyrdom. That’s why I sit proudly, as a cosmopolitan goddess, wearing no beads and bleeding all my Méxicanidad.

 

Frida

Love & Other Demons (Dancing Girl Press, 2017)

 

 

 

Bukowskifest

 

You call me from the

bedroom. “Let’s read

Bukowski the way he

would have.”

 

We sit on the bed,

wearing our

underwear  only and

sip Heineken beer

 

from the bottle. In

turn we read poems

full of drunkenness,

 

pain, death, sex,

solitude, roaches,

women, conversations.

 

The whole world rolls

out of our mouths

saddening us and

 

making us laugh.

So much depth,

so much life makes

 

me crave it all.

Mahler and the

Inferno, Dostoevsky,

 

poetry and more beer.

 

(for John)

 

 

Love & Other Demons (Dancing Girl Press, 2017)

 

 

 

Tongues

 

Tongues

do not talk,

they dance –

Firebirds that

scorch me

with their infinite

variations –

 

I am captured

by their straight-

for-back-ward

themes and all

their repetitions –

the harmonic

endlessness of

their counterpoint-

 

I hear their gaze

and their smirk,

the feathery

muscles play

satisfyingly their

devastating

 

capriccios –

 

 

Love & Other Demons (Dancing Girl Press, 2017)

 

 

 

 

 

https://dulcetshop.myshopify.com/products/love-other-demons-alessandra-bava

 

 

 

 
 

 

 

 

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BIO

 

Alessandra Bava is a poet and translator living in the Eternal city. She is the author of two bilingual chapbooks Nocturne and Guerrilla Blues both published in Italy. Three of her chapbooks have been published in the States: They Talk About Death (2014), Diagnosis (2015), and her latest Love & Other Demons (Dancing Girl Press, 2017). She has translated several poets in Italian and has edited an Anthology of New American Poets. Her poems and translations have appeared in several journals such as Gargoyle. Plath Profiles, THRUSH Poetry Journal and Waxwing. She is currently writing the biography of a contemporary American poet.