Poetry, Week 17: Ann Pedone

Stage Note
number two

 Hotel Sappho
Room 201
--/11/--

We’ve never been a couple. Not in the way most people
imagine couples. We undress in front of each other, and
there was that one time in Prague when we stood together
in the shower while I picked through his hair for lice.
We leave things behind for each other. Bits of twig that we
convince ourselves are stand-ins for something else. His
mother or the inside of my thigh. We write notes and poems in
really bad Greek. I know how he likes to fuck. I’ve never seen
him do it, but he has drawn pictures. Tall men with feral cat
bodies and dirty elbows. Short depressed Cavafys smoking a
cigarette somewhere on the outskirts of London. On the fourth
floor. Or the sixth. And more than once we sat on the floor
reading Tsvetaeva and Lispector while I showed him my
clitoris. And we agree that we don’t like anything the patriarchy
is selling and we have a stack of index cards on which we wrote
poetry and money should never be in bed together and we
sometimes leave them behind after we’ve eaten or peed some-
where.
 
One day last summer when we were both in New
York at the same time, I found a tube of lipstick on the street and
brought it back to the room and while he was sleeping I painted
his nipples with it. Both of them. Right and left. And for a week
after that, everywhere we went, we both walked backwards.
 
 

---

An Aria

If the Etruscans had won the war
If the soup had not boiled over
If English weren’t such an urgent language
If Michelangelo's David were circumcised
If bubbling, if spattering
If poetry weren’t so dead
If I could cum without needing so much philology
If Mussolini had known how to dance
If the shoulder of France weren’t hovering so close  
If stone, and then bronze
If every Roman knew the hymen trick
If beige
If sparrow
If someone finally came and opened all of these boxes  
If scopare “to fuck” did not sound so much like scappare “to escape”  
If I knew which of these was Catholicism’s erogenous zone
If I were more like an animal and less like a sonnet  
If Freud had taken Antigone, instead of Oedipus, as his point of departure  
If, by Sophia Loren, you meant  
If donc were a real word  
If all this Mediterranean light didn’t make me so God damn nervous

Ann is the author of The Medea Notebooks (spring, 2023 Etruscan
Press), and The Italian Professor’s Wife (Press 53), as well as
numerous chapbooks. Her work has recently appeared in The American
Journal of Poetry, Chicago Quarterly Review, 2River, The Louisville
Review, Barrow Street, and New York Quarterly. She has been nominated
for Best of the Net, and has appeared as Best American Poetry’s “Pick
of the Week”.