cavoli riscaldati (reheated cabbage)
By Rowan Tate
my mother offered me a knife from her butcher’s block
which is a definition of love. i scrolled back into time
beading bubbles of words together to string
around your neck as if a death sentence. tesoro mio,
you said some shit about being a bee that worships
at the mouth of a flower and now i see what you meant
is that there is always another flower, the bee always leaves.
in the beginning, the atoms
wanted to eat cheese, to have nails,
wanted to play tic tac toe, discover
bread, discover butter, put butter on bread,
wanted to watch a scratch heal and get
another one, wanted to make up words and
to have hair in different colors, to try
the green part of a watermelon,
wanted to become a child cartwheeling
through a sprinkler, a child
milking a goat, wanted to become a climber suspended
in a portaledge 3,000 feet over rock bottom,
to chase a hare into the thicket, fifteen and
making up a life.
Rowan Tate is a Romanian creative and curator of beauty currently. She reads nonfiction nature books, the backs of shampoo bottles, and sometimes minds.
Artwork Source: “Surrender,” Maria Pianelli Blair
Artist Statement: “Surrender” is a mixed media work, featuring vintage and contemporary ephemera and sequins. It explores the zen of finding one’s self in the natural world.
Maria Pianelli Blair is a writer and multidisciplinary artist based in New Jersey. Her artwork has been published in Contemporary Collage Magazine; FEELS Zine; Photo Trouvee Magazine; and Chill Mag, among other publications, and featured in both galleries and virtual exhibitions. Her writing has been published in Gypsophila Magazine, swim press, StepAway Magazine, the Staten Island Advance, and New Paltz Times. You can follow her on Instagram @strange_sunsets.
Poet’s Notes:
cavoli riscaldati is an Italian idiom used to allude an attempt to “make a doomed relationship work, restart a failed relationship, or pass off something old as new.”
The Turning Leaf Journal 