Mutism
Be silent, my flowers told me,
bloomed and black, mice in my body, half-rotten
mushrooms and firs and the grass.
Red machines into steel beams
that came and went from inside
greased my feet and chest, saying:
be silent, you, silence! you and your mother’s
faults, your father’s, you and your dead
blues on the night stand, please forget now:
the pipe is not ours, and water speaks
like an old morning when flowers in black
used to make colours: now hush, hush.
Giovanni Laera lives and works in Bari. He has a Ph.D. in Italian Linguistics and he has written several books and articles about lexicon, onomastics, and folklore in the Apulo-Barese dialects. He has published two poetry collections: Fiore che ssembe (Pietre Vive, 2019) and Maritmie (Marco Saya, 2023). He is included in the poetry anthologies I cieli della preistoria. Antologia della nuovissima poesia pugliese (Marco Saya, 2022) and Poesia dialettale oggi. Voci dalla Puglia (Carabba, 2024). He is editor-in-chief of «Avamposto – rivista di poesia».
Riccardo Benzina is a poet and translator from Bari (Italy). His work has appeared in Asymptote, Blackbox Manifold, Word For/Word, Otoliths, Tentacular Utsanga, Minima, and Die Leere Mitte. He is the author of Scenario (Taut Editori, 2022) and Midollo (Taut Editori, 2025).