Fabio Pusterla
Translated from the Italian by Will Schutt
In Chiasso, in a ho-hum
courtyard at the close
of the fifties, children
make a game of scaling
the fences to beat rugs—
a puff of metal and grass.
Eternal, the afternoon. Relentless,
the sheep-in-clouds sky.
Relentless, the games.
They climb up and hook
their knees over the crossbeam,
hanging head down, arms dangling,
and in their irrepressible
little voices cry out to the world,
“We’re monkeys!
Beautiful brown apes, orango-tangos,
tiny monkeys doing the ‘Petàce’!”
Then they laugh in the late postwar period.
“Petacci,” they’re corrected
by a mother with a long memory.
“Play all you want, don’t hurt yourselves,
but the saying is ‘Do the Petacci.’ And remember:
she wasn’t the only one
to swing there.”
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Drawing of Langston Hughes with stylised chain gang
“A Lost Work by Langston Hughes"

In a newly discovered manuscript published for the first time in English, Langston Hughes reflected, "on a topic as relevant today as it was in 1933: the injustice of black incarceration. And he captured the story of a man that—like the stories of so many other young black men—would otherwise be lost."

via SMITHSONIAN MAGAZINE
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What Sparks Poetry:
Yona Harvey on Sonia Sanchez’s
"Summer Words of a Sistuh Addict"

"How is it that we come to know this young sistuh so intimately? There’s her cool revelation that shooting up actually felt 'gooooood' and 'gooder than doin it' and that she wants to 'do it again.' There’s no shame in her sexuality or her 'remembered high.' We come to learn all these details, but never through the lens of exploitation, sensationalism, or judgment. This is because Sanchez never intrudes on the poem. The explicit 'i' narrator does not exist in this poem. A lesser poet would relish some kind of confession or faux street credibility for witnessing. But Sanchez’s poem is the anodyne for voyeurism."

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