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
____________________________________________
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.