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Death
by Renaissance
Poems
by
Paola Corso
with photographs
by George Thomas Mendel
An
Excerpt |
MY
VERY OWN CLEANING LADY
I
always thought I’d do my own cleaning,
never
forget
the working-class way
of
Italian American women like my mother who kept
a
broom
beside
her front door as if it were
a
sign that read, “we work hard, we clean hard
so
wipe
your
damn feet on the welcome mat before
you
step inside.” The broom was a sign that well-off
’mericans
didn’t
understand; they saw it as clutter
that
belonged in a tool shed behind a fence
in the back
yard
with the snow blower and the leaf blower
and
the lawn mower. Then I moved to
Brooklyn,
bought
a
co-op apartment, had a baby and a contractor who
skipped
town in the middle of renovation. He left me in
dirty
living
hell with a nursing newborn,
650
square feet of filth and six ounces of breast milk
every
four hours,
dust
he knew my own prosperity created
because
I could afford to add on a second
bedroom. I was
another
‘merican
in this immigrant’s eyes who’d just pay
to
have someone else clean up after him. It was
all I could
do
to take a shower but I ignored signs
in
our lobby that advertised “PhDs who clean.” It wasn’t
in
me
to
hire someone, even a scholar gathering
dust
samples for a doctoral thesis. I
still thought
money
would
never change hands to get the apartment
clean
when my mother came for a visit. She wanted to but
didn’t
ask
why
not a house in
Pittsburgh, why I waited so long
to
leave my job and have a baby. She filled a bucket
of
water,
scrubbed
the floor on her knees one square foot at a time
Payback
for all those Saturday mornings I helped her clean. As she
rinsed
her
rag and said the contractor’s name in vain,
I
rested on the sofa with my son, remembering
dust
to dust.
EXPRESSED
My
father drove 382 miles from
Pittsburgh
to
Brooklyn
and didn’t find a parking space. His welcoming was a $60 ticket and sticky
sap all over his windshield from the sycamores on our tree-lined street. We
moved the car to a legal spot then took a taxi to Home Depot to buy light
fixtures and to Home Depot again for a toilet seat because I couldn’t leave a
nursing baby for longer than a few hours at a time. After my father hung the
ceiling light, he picked up operations instructions for a Purely Yours breast
pump. I sat at the kitchen table with my nursing bra flaps down, exposing
breasts hard and engorged while he rigged tubing to the machine, set the dial,
and handed me the suction cup. When my milk began to sputter into the bottle, he
winked and left me with a pitcher of water to drink as I expressed one breast at
a time in calibrated dribs and drabs. The room grew dark, but he came back to
switch on the ceiling fixture he had just installed. And in his light, my eyes
gradually began to adjust to the bold pattern of the newly hung wallpaper, to
the full bottle of milk in front of me, waiting to see my cream rise to the top
in the freezer before the faint tint of blue.
THE
DOCTOR MAKES HIS DIAGNOSIS*
I
have two cities but only one home
that
is my mother’s womb
with
one long umbilical cord
that
reaches across thousands
of
frequent flyer miles.
I
have two apartments and one window
filled
with pleats of light
and
a sooty curtain
that
no matter the color
is
a checkered gray.
I
have “an abiding devotion” to my birthplace,
so
when I go back to
Pittsburgh,
I’m
stupida for living in
Brooklyn
and
when I’m living in
Brooklyn,
I’m
mad with longing.
I
have an “afflicted imagination”
that
incapacitates my body, causing
nausea,
loss of appetite, high fever,
pathological
changes in the lungs,
brain
inflammation, and cardiac arrest.
I
have a “lifeless and haggard countenance,”
an
“idleness conducive to daydreaming”
about
thick village milk and
Iron
City
beer,
about
the sounds of bagpipes and Terrible Towels
whipping
in stadium winds.
I
have three college degrees and seven bookcases
but
rely solely on “associationist magic.”
When
I climb the stairs to the torch
of
the Statue of Liberty, I imagine being
at
the top of an idle factory smokestack.
I
have a “highly contagious disease” but curable
if
you purge my stomach, induce torture and pain.
I
can be ridiculed, laughed out of my homesickness
unless
you see me as a working-class woman
who
does a white-collar job with blue-collar hands.
*Swiss Doctor Johannes Hofer coined the
word “nostalgia” in his 1688 medical dissertation Dissertatio
Medica de Nostalgia.
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