Two Poems
Massimo Fantuzzi
Fragile Thing
Portico of the sweetest poverty,
we had made it. Small
sign, smaller sin
preyed from a papyrus waxy roof.
Sandy alcove, us
inebriated of sodium air
in this provisional estuary
from which we’d chart
a course conditional
to each one to plunge and
catch, each, a star. What freedom
among the underground conduits of our city,
incessant spiral of arms, belt
of fascinations
hissing the night
from both ends of a smile?
May 17th
Pulls, cuts, soaring, rocks.
Marble quarry,
crystal blue, open pool to
boyhood and hunting rivalry.
Searching deep are but the orbiting dregs in
the sockets of our arms,
pursuits that an ash-coloured fog
would drown into a paste. Time dressed,
redressed into torrents of notes,
purpura eruptions saturated land
inscribed in half-moons of smoking tyres,
wire and corrugated sheets, rust of a
piercings glare now back with felon’s pity,
devotee’s calm, martyr’s resolve. Overhead,
director’s command, «Sunshine
all along the way.»
Massimo Fantuzzi is a British-Italian dual national born in Milan author of the collection of poems and prose poems Marcia Gioie (Alkalea, 1999). He lives in Leicestershire, where he works in special education. Member of the editorial board at Triggerfish Critical Review, his poems have appeared in Orbis, Tears in the Fence, The North, A New Ulster, Abridged, Poetry Salzburg Review, BlazeVox, E·ratio, Otoliths, Maintenant, In Parentheses, Berkeley Poetry Review, The Dalhousie Review, Il Cucchiaio nell’Orecchio, Multiperso, Radioquestasera, and elsewhere.