Umbra by Michelle Reale

On a cold day in June I rocked my granddaughter to sleep. I buried my face in her curls then felt an intense swirl of heat surrounding me. It rested in my throat. This came on the heels of a week of ultramarine dreams, which made me feel out of time. I kept pressing my feet into the floor, trying to ground myself. I emptied out a folder of old photos. I focused on one of my father in Rome’s Piazza del Popolo, his hands deep into the pockets of an overcoat with broad shoulders. Common nightingales in various states of flight surrounded him. He looked pensive, much the way his own father tended to look in photos. Always an edge of fear. The colors in the photo were muted with time, much like my father’s memory of that day. The sky was such a pale blue, it looked nearly bereft. It awakened a homesickness in me that had thus far been muted. I tracked the cause of past suffering to indecision and maybe a lack of touch. Emotional investments made me realize that I was made for freedom, but the road was narrow. I must have an ancestor somewhere, whose name, long forgotten, meant something important that could be useful to me, who could help me to survive certain brutalities. The future may make us tremble, but we will walk into it anyway. Once someone loved me and gave me a diamond ring like my very own star, brilliant, but prone to fading over millennia. Love was a miracle in the way that hysteria is: it comes out of nowhere and no one can make sense of it in time enough for it to matter. There is a photograph of me, but it is a creation of my own imagination. I am wearing a light violet dress. The sun is weak. I am pensive, like my father. I am off to the side, leaving most of the photograph empty. But I have a memory and I want to pass it on to the little one in my arms: behind enormous light, there was a raw purple moon. My blood diamond. A far off summer symphony. Now my ring finger is empty save for the scar where it used to sit like a shining star.



Michelle Reale is the author of several poetry and flash collections, including Season of Subtraction (Bordighera Press), Blood Memory (Idea Press), In the Year of Hurricane Agnes (Alien Buddha Press), and Terra Ballerina (Alien Buddha Press). She is the Founding and Managing Editor for both OVUNQUE SIAMO: New Italian-American Writing and The Red Fern Review. She teaches poetry in the MFA program at Arcadia University.