Exhaustion

if she could use
her hands to fasten
a button twist a knob
scribble a letter
to tell me she dreams
about tailpipes
thirteen parts assembled
again and over
like a broken dance
of two palms
stroking rubbery backs
fingers bowing
to partners swollen
with gnarled collapse
snapping delicate cylinders
joints in place
for the socket and bend of it
as she dismantles her own
one occupation at a time
even before they tell her
with owning fists
to speed the quota
because flesh is thick
in a town that has no fire
just cold furnaces
and breadsinners
with lottery eyes or
bingo on their breath
so where can she go
if the work of her hands
is meant for reaching
the grasp of all things falling

Paola Corso
Death by Renaissance (Bottom Dog Press, January 2004)

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.

Paola Corso
Death by Renaissance (Bottom Dog Press, January 2004)