My New Black Magazine - NYU Black Renaissance Noire BRN-FALL-206 ISSUE RELEASE | Page 60
Nightriders
Il Duce’s Villa
In the rearview mirror of a pickup turning a corner
peaked heads crowd around a burning cross.
Mussolini took his mistresses
there, where everything’s built
to outlast a plunder of secret clocks,
& now newlyweds rent his bed for luck.
Silence illuminates flesh & myth till they’re one
song of blood bloating the crescent till branches sag.
The mirror glimpses one of the four horsemen,
& he’s the ugliest angel ever caught in a dogwood.
But one would think this ritual
sours the sweetest love apples
as rosewater turns to vinegar
& all doubt is left black & blue.
I can still see those Africans
selling knock-off sunglasses
& watches for upright middlemen
hidden in the everyday light.
In a square people throw rocks
at two ghosts hanging upside down.
Fano is now a half hour away,
& the engineer grips his brake.
Every tree here is a magician.
There’s a country in the young
women & men at tall windows
set in stone, but maybe their bodies
try too hard to answer D’Annunzio’s
lore of dead shepherds. As the train
speeds into a tyranny of frescoes,
into breathless depth & coloration
of stoicism, the blanched villa
in my head. Newlyweds tangled
in sweaty linen dream of egrets
clouding Ethiopia’s brown Coptic hills.
BLACK RENAISSANCE NOIRE
In a deep vista of scrub oak a hoot owl names
the lost one, & he becomes the never-heard-of.
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The fleshy scent of magnolia rekindles the years,
& a single night cannibalizes a century of blooms.