Sometimes, When My Stiff Joints Pop, Women Appear and Want to Talk to Me
 
 
No matter how carefully I move, these women want to use their tongues.
 
We all know that the dead can’t speak, but some can shake rice in a tin sieve.
 
A poet told me the first tambourine was formed in Italian groves 
 
where women danced while cleaning rice and later, where women conjured ghosts.
 
(My father was an Italian man. So are my husband and my son.)
 
I was ashamed to tell them I swapped my father’s name for my husband’s:
 
the vowels so round at the end, they slipped into my smooth white sockets.
 
No matter how far back I searched, the names were fathers’ names—thick as guns.
 
If I owned a gun, it would have a cool, ghost-white mother-of-pearl grip
 
and an exposed silver-toned barrel, silver back strap, slide, and hammer.
 
Its sound would sound more like air sucked out of small pink lungs, or finger snaps.
 
No matter how far back I travelled—Avellino, Salerno, Rome--
 
all I found was a man’s silver axe, his hammer, a boy, a blacksmith.
 
No matter how I move now, women pop out of me. They sound like guns.

                                                                           (finalist, originally published in Solstice Literary Magazine, summer, 2020)