“Margherita Bassi's pieces have remarkable maturity and ease; still, they remain outward-looking and manage to engage nuanced political questions while always anchoring characters in quiet, intimate exchange.”
— McCarthy Award Judges
You say,
Let’s go to a place with
white curtains and
wooden floors to walk
barefoot,
where the ocean quietly mumbles outside our window,
or perhaps there are trees whose
star shaped leaves tap against the
glass.
I say, It should be a place that is nowhere, with nothing to do.
We’d lay in a bed of
cream and mahogany carved with seashells and birds and
we’d trace the wood with our fingertips when we raise our arms and
stretch our legs and
I’d ask if you remember that time, we swam naked in the sea,
with the sun heavy on our shoulders
and the Mediterranean in our eyes.
You’d kiss me like you did then— and then we’d watch the stars, and we’d name every constellation we never have the time to notice because now
we live and breath
cement and stone
but not if we go to the house
that is
nowhere, with nothing to do.
We’d do it all slowly.
Wondering if God exists and screaming his name and the devil’s down valleys of red poppies.
Let’s go to a place where the wind and the earth and the sun speak in different tongues and
we’d speak the language of
touch and
teeth
while they chatter about us.
It should be small in a big place and maybe
I’d say I feel like a child
again but also
as old as the trees whose ribs are orbited
with centuries of
rings.
I’d ask if you remember that time we both cried in the theater lobby.
In this place that is nowhere,
with nothing to do,
you’d ride a bike and
I’d ride that same bike by sitting on the handlebars and
you’ll lean forward and
you won’t mind my hair in your face as you whisper,
“Do you believe in soul mates?”
We’d both say no but
we’d sit before the temple of coincidence that brought us here,
at this time,
with these scars on our bodies and these stains on our fingertips knee to
knee breast to
breast.
I’d ask if you remember that time we ate
cheap burritos in that
stairwell in that
library in
Paris, when we thought we knew each other -- and we did -- but somehow
it was like the first time again.
But nowhere is like
neverland
and nothing is like
everything
is like those places that tickle our collarbones in dreams.
You ask me if I’m still scared of the dark.
I say yes but I turn the lights off,
and for a moment it is
as if we were in a place that is
nowhere,
with nothing to do.