Two Poems, Marika Preziuso

Accents: A Manifesto

I booked a blow job at two - I declare

to the large man at a London Supercut. 

A blow ….what?  shouts he over blasting dryers 

Sounding hopeful.

21, holding a tiny dictionary in my left hand.

Freshly off my boat.

How are you doing honey? asks the lady 

At the college town check-out, somewhere south.

and all I do is unravel my immigrant drama,

 a line of impatient patrons growing out my back. 

Hoping - but suspecting - that she did not mean 

how I was really doing.

32, on a student visa without credit cards. 

Freshly off my boat.

An accent is an accent is an accent.

An accent is welcome/exotic/ shame-filled/ opting silence. 

An accent is charming. Curiosity Invited. Beguiling.

An accent is cilantro/garnish/ decorative/ lovely.

An accent is an exit door, a deceptive map, an escape plan.

An accent straddles two worlds.

At least.

An accent is the estrangement of family.

Mis-translating ahead. All the time. 

Faking spontaneity, when family is obvious scheming & fault lines.

An accent is code-switching, confused dreaming, 

Emboldened Scusa & Ti voglio bene & Per sempre.

Of a secret love language until your lover 

Types these in Google Translate.

An accent is a stubborn escoria of places never quite home:

When Cuba no longer welcomed my interviews to political exiles,

When London rents went off the roof,

When I stopped being Elena Ferrante 

for Americans who never spent more than three days in Naples ( you say is safe there?),

When Rome became too dump and provincial,

I handed a pile of fears at customs.

Tongue-lost,

English-compassed,

I kept an accent, 

The only betrayal I still trust.

Smagliature di significato: A Palimpsest Poem

Una silhouette di donna of a certain age,

una figura incerta,

from behind, leaning over her son

in a sunny avenue.

Una calza smagliata. 

Ripped. 

Solo una.

 

And I think: how familiar,

How dishonest, perturbante,

a map can be

when worn down to the bone. 

 

How precious, how delicate 

is mother’s fabric on my skin

that opens up, loosens up

                       Inevitabilmente.

 

Her words

are smagliature di significato:

They either cluster or intermit,

her silk tearing up, 

trailing stubbornly behind my story

 

always ahead of it.

 

I lean towards her mouth to listen 

and I am in awe 

with the many layers of meaning

She is not aware of.

 

Beneath her common sense 

and uncommon sadness

my mother’s heart smaglia.

                            Inevitabilmente.

Marika Preziuso is Professor of World Literature at the Massachusetts College of Arts and Design, in Boston (MA), where she teaches 20th century and contemporary postcolonial literature by migrant and diasporic writers, speculative fiction of the uncanny and Afrofuturist literature.  Marika is a trilingual writer, a RYT yoga instructor, and a meditation guide. She infuses the embodied, reflective qualities of these practices in her poetry, which investigates various states of liminality and mis-translation and the ways these complicate any poetic intersection of self, craft, and culture. Marika’s recent poetry experiments with strategies of linguistic resistance and cultural opacity to challenge nation-bound imaginaries of Americanness, Britishness, Italianness (among other "-nesses"), and their attendant exoticization of "foreign others". For more about Marika’s work and writing, visit www.marikapreziuso.com