The first to walk across a snowfall
To recognize Eden
Speak the country of silence
Cast spells against time
Resolve decay
Make multiple heart donations
Practice empathy
And symmetrical peacemaking
Craft things unseen
List the clouds
Condense night
Love the shadow of a lover
Accept death as revision
Author: Salvatore Ala
Snowflakes
On such a night it’s unclear
How many make it home
Get blown far
Fall from higher
Are prisms needles fernlike
Are columns
Enfold a star
Last the night
Shatter or remain intact
Coexist
Continue through
Become buried
Touch lips
Cover eyes
Kiss creation
Maria Theresa Ala
Maria Theresa Ala of New York Harbor
The ocean crashes back
Beautiful Maria Theresa of Ellis Island
History crashes back
Mother of exiles enlightening the world
Maria Theresa of passenger ships
Adrift in the absence of time
Maria Theresa Ala of America
Vineyards spring up in song
Maria Theresa America
Immigrant of echoes and incarnations
Brooklyn Maria Theresa Ala
Mother of strong mothers of freedom
Gaetano Ala
Gaetano Ala played guitar
Gaetano juggled grenades
And gardened in mustard gas
Gaetano smoked Gauloises
Got lost in the gaze
Of a Greek beauty in Algiers
Gained passage to Paraguay
Growing homesick again
For mother Mediterranean
Gaetano Ala played guitar
Gaetano smoked Gauloises
Immigrant and migrant
A grave in every ground
Great-great-grandparent ghost
Gaetano of ancient Gaeta
Gaetano Ala Gaetano
The margins of a designation
Grammarians agree
Wings of time and nothingness
Poetic Observation
Lately I’ve been standing at my window to write. Then I return to my desk. Then I go back to the window. After a morning of this back and forth, I realize I’m writing a poem on both sides of a pane of glass.
The Music’s Paid
Breath and brass are familiars
Blending soulful elements
Woods mimic habitat
And voice a common life
All over the world
A percussion is being heard
Strings fuse vibrations
And the earth shudders
Time piecemeals music
To save us from the din
Set in motion
It sways a deafened god
The music’s paid
Let us dance until we love
Neutral Recovery
“Nor it nor no remembrance what it was.”
Shakespeare
Someone sick in neutral recovery I know
Lifts autumn leaves from her eyes,
Dresses in her nakedness,
Walks half the hospital road
Where visitors come and go
Like days through a breathing tube.
You can see the leveling in her face
And at her fourth-floor window,
October mixing with her image,
Branches growing slowly bare,
All her hope appeased and fair,
Lingering like a longer summer.
Someone sick in neutral recovery I know
Gathers all her strength for winter,
Goes more boldly into cold,
Neither well nor worse in her transparency.
Mythic News
How can you kill a Daphne Caruana Galizia?
That’s like killing all flowers,
like killing ourselves
to get at it something already dead.
How can you kill a Daphne Caruana Galizia?
She was made from everything
between non-being and substance.
She was made from the fabric of words.
She takes root in truth.
She branches into the immaterial
like prophecy, like genus, like blood…
How can you kill a Daphne Caruana Galizia?
That’s like killing off trees
expecting light to crown its own shade,
like killing numbers
and seeing plurality die:
Daphne Caruana Galizia, Daphne of Malta,
Daphne transformed.
Bitting Cuts
I’ve dad’s key to the barbershop.
I keep it on my key ring
for its wistful returns.
It opens the barbershop door.
There’s dad, arms frozen in air,
asking me to sweep ancient hair.
I don’t mind but for cinema lines,
in which case I’m still embarrassed—
People looking in, as through time,
at the immigrant kid
swept up in a barber’s dream,
without purpose or ambition.
Watchmaker’s Paradox
I return to the watchmaker
whom I’ve killed before,
dead battery and time capsule,
fixed on this escarpment,
a zombie in love with a dream,
nostalgic for a golden age,
arms heavy with toxic snails,
hands moist with murderous gel
and my nuclear arsenal
and hairspring trigger
for his eternal recurrence.
I return to the watchmaker
whom I’ve killed before,
being of his chronology,
mirroring my own assassin,
deep time running under strata
like gear trains through mind.
Salvatore Ala 