by Kristina Marie Darling 

issue 67

A clasped hand is rarely safe, especially in the spring. 
That day everything in Rome was burning: the chapel,
the little school in Trastevere, and the restaurant, with 
its ostentatious display of carved ice. Now the long
goodbye, the final exchange of gifts. Because their
narrative is not specific to a particular year, it could
belong to any of them. And so the young man fired a
cannon to take his beloved back to the city, giving the
Mediterranean its first real war—

                                                                It is difficult to
understand this gesture as politics, since it reads like an
epithalamion, but nothing in history is isolated—and
some of us inevitably become pillars of the resistance.
Are you reading the street signs. Those little pictures
are monuments to chance. How frightening when their
meaning emerges. The soldiers, looking left, begin to
duck their heads.