On certain November afternoons
a shine of water slides
over windows in the room and the aquarium
of your life dense with silence like
a household wave it rises up unfeigned
to lap the walls and the opalescent
reflection of the absent ones: they’re lined up
like a small army on the dresser,
two-dimensional and smiling from their frontier
limbo, they seem to want to say
that everything flows into a funnel of days
and that real thirst can find no comfort,
until the rain cancels
your body’s fragile traces.
Silvia Rosa (Turin, 1976) holds a degree in Educational Sciences and works as a teacher. She has written five poetry collections, including “Tutta la terra che ci resta” (Vydia, 2022) and “Tempo di riserva” (Giuliano Ladolfi, 2018), as well as a contemporary history essay titled “Italiane d’Argentina. Storia e memorie di un secolo d’emigrazione al femminile (1860-1960)” (Ananke, 2014), and a collection of short stories. She has contributed to several anthologies, including “Bestie. Femminile animale” and “Confine donna: poesie e storie di emigrazione” (Vita Activa Nuova, 2023 and 2022), as a co-author and editor, respectively; “Maternità marina” (Terra d’ulivi, 2020), where she served as editor and photographer; and “Italia Argentina ida y vuelta: incontri poetici” (Versante Ripido/La Recherche, 2017), a collection dedicated to Argentine poetry, for which she translated the texts into Italian. Her poems have been translated into Spanish, Serbian, Greek, Portuguese, Romanian, and Turkish.
Brenda Porster, poet and translator, was born in the U.S., and studied there before coming to Italy, where she has lived and worked most of her life. Her poetry, in both English and Italian, has been widely published in literary magazines and anthologies both in Italy and abroad. Specialized in literary translation, her translations of contemporary Italian poets appear in important journals in various English-language countries. Recently, her bilingual poetry collection, A Litte Girl’s Bestiary was published by Effigi ed., Italy.
