METROPOLITANA

Short Story by Kathryn Rantala

A kitten is mewing in the alley, but I cannot stop to help it now. My family believes I am a lost cause as I run out the door and into the street, though this is not about loss, and not entirely about lust. Each has a clock like everything else that will run its course—but right now there is only one thing on my mind and I am running as fast as I can to Lazarro’s apartment.

I want to live in the apartment with Lazarro and Lucca. One of them is tall, the other nearly the same; one dark as the heritage they share which is less clear than it would seem by their names. I am Italian, one of them may or may not be, both of them work for the city outside the Drago Gate. They return to Little Italy as I do for Sunday dinner.

Gasperetti’s has the best antipasto in the world, and on Sundays it is huge, big enough for the whole table, big enough almost to be the table. Everything is arranged on a large plate in sections like pizza slices merging to the center: olives, salami, peppers, oil, mushrooms, squid, garbanzos, everything buoyed by oil on ceramic. We eat in a stucco building with a statue outside and statues of candles in bottles inside. Such buildings are everywhere in the neighborhood and all the same color, but there is only one Gasperetti’s and everyone comes, especially on Sunday.

Lazarro lives in a stucco building, the City View Apartments, locally known as Lago della Citta, though not near a lake but a park. He plays bocce ball on the lawn of the park, where it is more like lawn bowling. Bocce is best played on a clay court. Because of the grass he throws the ball in the puntata, or gentle, method rather than lobbing or tossing it. He delivers from a crouched position, releasing it in a slow rolling motion. The tracks of his efforts are like smooth contrails in a green sky. His mind, some say, is also in the sky but his power is in the muscles of his back as they shift, stretch and roll with his movements, the back where I sometimes splay my fingers until I forget I have them.

When the ball lands near the pallino, or jack, its closeness is measured from outside to outside, not from the near edges of the two balls.

When Lazarro releases, he turns away; neither willing its direction nor watching it on its way. He may be thinking of antipasto or he may be thinking of me. The ball nestles near the pallino like a nesting chick and is not easily dislodged. His skill is a kind of magic, and he enchants me.

We live in a neighborhood of parks clustered around a smaller central park with a lake. It, too, is laid out like pizza slices—parks bordered by streets like spokes, peppered with stucco red. The lake is Il Centro. A man from the city monitors the softness of the lake, adding this if it is too hard, that if it is too soft. Plants and trees lead up from the lake all the way to the ends of the neighborhood, but there are no plants or ducks or fish in it, and you cannot swim in it. The maintenance man is an orderly, tall fellow with his eye on things, keeping cements and solids and water one place, living things apart. He is a retired designer from the Parks Development and Maintenance Department.

In another park, he placed painted concrete renditions of black longshoremen’s caps in an orderly, large orbit around a Roman pine. All day long, weather permitting, the sun adjusts its viewpoint and shows the correct hour by a line: a black diagonal from a tree with white roots holding it straight.

By looking into this park, men in trucks know whether to hurry or slow down; the expense of a good watch offset by a small city tax. Children are conceived in these trucks on dim days when the park is timeless and illusions of beauty rise above the clouds. The need to seek joy on high is a cause for the frequent use of Saints’ names in our neighborhood.

Lazarro himself sprung from love in a City Light truck, a gift from the temporarily obscured city. His father named him for what he was just then, what he and the mother thought he would likely be: one with men closed off from the sun. They mourn a memory of light, such men, tied to wages and night driving. Meters or clocks, circular delivery routes; all are the same to them. At the end of the night one of them wakes up trapped. The others watch to see if the stones will roll away so he can keep going on.

Lazarro is not one of those, and hope is not the same as bocce, though both require practice. Lazarro is the bocce champion for the Sons of Italy and I am gaining on him like a wooden ball downhill.

I will move in with him Friday, Saturday or Sunday if he can get a truck and if we can stay out of the back of it. And if we can find Lucca.

Lucca lives under a great long bridge; a pedestrian-only walkway interconnecting with a series of others laid over the top of city like a fishnet helmet or the stairways of Piranesi. When I think of the strands of walkers overhead I think of Piranesi’s Carceri d’invenzione, all piers and planes and ladders. In this picture, the arch connecting the pier on the left with the one in the center—when you look at them, you think the piers are on the same plane, but the staircase connecting them suggests they are not. It is a puzzle that leads to others. I stole a book about Piranesi from the library, leaving the mystery of emptiness on the shelf.

It excites me to think about Lucca, who is different from Lazarro, though they look something alike. He is quiet and wears glasses without frames and writes outlines of poetry. He says even a cloud has substance and he wants to show it by highlighting its parts. He lives over a bridge to the north by another bridge to the west, down the serpentine stairs and around a couple of buildings, up to the third floor of a cantilevered apartment over a store and a vodka bar. Below the apartment the road diverges which, if you are driving, leads to the Drago Gate.

This is the Russian sector. The first time we were together I had Borscht after. I wanted to like it, to show him how much I wanted to be with him, but I didn’t like it and afterward Lucca, who can always tell, said, "Never mind, cara mia, the snow, the beach, like the wine and your throat, they are all of them so white and so here right now and in contrast to the beet…..who can know?” When I think of Lucca outlining, my mind moves out in a fan like a series of contrails over the parks. I worry they will fall on something. “Not all of me is dust,” says Lucca, quoting his beloved Pushkin, though I feel much of me is dust and space debris.

Lazarro and Lucca are taking classes at the city college. I met them when I took up drafting, hoping for a job with the junior architects of the city.

Lucca was born beneath one of the footbridges, against a pier, canopied by the structures that criss-cross the top of the city. It was dark and dirty and his birth just happened where it would happen. He was not homeless but the story of it, told to him later, made him feel that he was and would always be. He mewed like a kitten in the damp, they said, and then he became a serious young man, at ease with the painted icons and wheezing accordions of his neighbors.

He is dark and fierce in concentration, a kind of well—an irreligious man, deep, and outwardly pale. Something in him aspires, but he does not keep jobs and his conversations leave a shape of sadness in the air. He shouts when he reads poetry aloud, murmurs when speaking his own words. His mind has layers and spikes and contradictions and I love him like the softening whites of my eyes when they clear from crying.

In the past I cried a lot, though I can’t remember just why. I feared that my eyes would flood and wash one way or the other leaving too many in one place. I would sense the longing in one of them to be on the other side and it made my heart hurt. This wandering disposition of my eyes made me want to never cry again. Even so, sometimes I did. Lucca tells me to mind the gods of the inside, be sure they never merge with the gods of the out.

Lucca also says he loves me. He is a man who knows what to do and of course he would say that. But it doesn’t matter, as long as I have his attention. And Lazarro.


*

The terminus for the railway is close to Lucca’s apartment. You can see it from his apartment. I love trains and while we pack his things we stop to look out the window at an incoming train whistling and steaming its arrival. At that instant, a woman on the platform also looks out, leaning toward the train. It hits her but doesn’t stop right then, of course, it must go several more yards before it can do that, maneuvered by tracks into the shade and down through the station as if drawn through the mid-Atlantic rift. The woman became her aura the instant she leaned out; a project in discretion for hours to come for the yardmen. It is hard not to look at it. I go as pale as Lucca; as Anna Karenina.

At that very moment Lazarro arrives at the apartment. He says, "Tovarisch! Check your watch!" He is smiling, and I see that for the first time in his life, he is on time.

Lucca and I are moving in with Lazarro in his apartment at Lago della Citta today. It is an old building. The flat has plenty of room and a view of a stairway up to the bridge. Lazarro has lived here for three years. I feel very at home here. Happily, Lucca does too, and he grows more expansive by the hour. He says he will call it La Grotta Petrarca, shouting from Francesco’s 1366 Letter to Boccaccio: “0 inglorious age! that scorns antiquity, its mother, to whom it owes every noble art…” Lazarro beams and in this moment I love them both like the first flash of the sun on the sea.

*

Lazarro has a bocce game this afternoon, so he cooks Italian breakfast for us: prima colazione. We have maritozzo alla crema o all'albicocca, which he says is just a croissant filled with cream or with apricot jam. None of us speaks Italian, though Lucca is studying it. Lazarro says food tastes better in Italian but he only learns the titles. After, we have caffe doppio to keep us awake. There should be more: a casserole, some fruit, but we do not eat heavily. The stairs of the apartment, the climb to the footbridges, the bridges themselves, all these are too much with a big meal. We need to save ourselves for Sunday at Gasperetti’s.

Lucca has night classes three weeknights out of five. Lazarro plays bocce every day at the park. His father, a fan of DiMaggio, once told him what Joe’s father said to Joe: “Bocce ball? No money in bocce. Baseball, that’s the game!” But we are what we are, lucky if we happen to know what that is.

Today Lazarro is practicing for an afternoon challenge game with the team from another park. We are not watching the practice. I need to draft and study. Lucca is smoking and reading poetry. Once in a while he stops reading and shouts something beautiful. Later we will dine on the successes of our young maestro.

It is a perfect day for bocce, for Lazarro, for me; a perfect day for Lucca, reading Montale too loud: “A white dove has landed me among headstones, under spires where the sky nests.”

On the first throw of the game Lazarro finesses the ball very close to the jack and forces his opponents into a limiting defense. They resort to a strong shot, a flying volo with a reverse spin. The move is ineffective and leaves disfiguring dents in the green. The winning measurement is followed by the usual arguments and gestures, the sullen darkening of the faces of the visiting cadre. Then someone announces that the wine and pizza have arrived and everyone relaxes.

The hero of the game is Lazarro, of course. He always wins it for his side. He is Lazarro, the puntatore. The sun shines on him, day and night, and through him on his new family: the faithful, melancholy Lucca, the adoring Rosella.

*

It is late evening and I believe I am the only one awake in the flat, lying at peace in my bed. The rooms breathe with sleep. The weather is slight, the buildings shift and sigh within the curtains. Light moves through them, from cars and lamps, showing and hiding the stairwells, the walls, the curtains: a slow kinescope.

The stairs to the bridges are central in our dreams, a possible link to heaven, though links are only partway, go-betweens and compromise, their endings interchangeable with their beginnings. On the steps between are the scattered, abandoned packages from people who use them. The remains may be a sandwich wrapper or a tiny new Lucca or the unimaginable detritus of hideous acts.

Connecting the streets to the arches, stairs keep us from flying away. Some are circular, some straight or squared around an inconvenience or a beauty. They are placed to avoid windows though their nature is communication. Supports on each end of the treads are usually parallel beams. Sometimes there is only a single center beam, then from a distance it resembles a top-heavy vessel, its masts balanced above the sea by handrails.

Stairs must be used to be stairs. Some that are not heavily traveled, those near the web-center of the city where there are choices, are skipped over. These gather dust that must be swept aside if people want to sit—and then they are seats. Occasionally a stairway is replaced, all of it at once, a delicate maneuver in spare quarters when character is pendant with peril.

Stairs should make sense, unlike Piranesi’s terrible graces that stop and start in the eddies. Their open, territorial flues are equal in the going up as in the coming down, and some representative of us, night or day, goes up and down them like the weights of an old clock.

*

Lucca has been listless and quiet for several weeks. Today he hangs his head out the window, looking down. There is nothing but a vacant lot below him. A neighborhood vegetable patch was planted there in the coarse, dry dirt and died within days. A year later, the ground is nothing but rock and litter. Lucca droops like a beagle, and I fear he might jump.

Lazarro asks him, “Lucca! What’s going on?” He answers, his Montale uncharacteristically quiet, “Quanto può giungere, / quanto può andarsene, / in un mondo che non si muove!” but neither of us understands what he has said and it is clear to me that Lucca is still lost in thought about something. Just for a minute I wonder if it is someone rather than something—and someone other than me.

*

“It isn’t that I don’t like poetry,” Lazarro tells me one day, “I do, but it helps if it is in my own language. And if it makes sense some way. I love it when Lucca is shouting it. But he doesn’t do that very much anymore. I want him to lift his head up and bray out the window.” I am listening to him and thinking about Lucca. But then his black hair falls across his eyes as he leans toward me, an attentive parallel as I recline slowly. For a moment, in the quiet apartment, with evening shuttering down the street, we think only of the two of us and the kind of poetry we can make that way.

*

Before Lazarro and Lucca, at the museum one day, I met Franco, a cartographer. Standing in front of Leonardo’s “Plan of Imola, 1502,” the mustachioed Franco started speaking as if a docente,as if continuing a thought, addressing someone. To save him from the certain embarrassment of an absent audience, I stepped forward.

“This is probably the earliest map which it is possible to date, the first-ever geometric plans drawn of a town, probably for strategic reasons, with distances and directions.” His mustache never moved as the words came out, ropes uncoiling from a forest floor. He pointed toward the next drawing to the right. “Vasari recorded Leonardo as ‘frequently occupied in the preparation of plans to remove mountains or to pierce them with tunnels from plain to plain.’”

I kept my eyes on the drawing of Imola, for strategic reasons. Franco turned to look at me. “It was Leonardo who suggested an answer to a question which had been asked since ancient times, that being whether or not the movement of heavenly bodies produces any sound.”

Though departing for another country in the morning, he offered to see me home. I led him up and down stairways, over bridges as complicated as Leonardo’s cosmologies, through a low window and into my room at my parents’ house. He read the spines of my books, had a glass of wine, explained Leonardo’s theories on the silent movement of the heavens, kissed me on the forehead, curled up on the sofa and went to sleep. He was gone in the morning.

The possibilities of cartography bloomed in my head as an arcane and chaste toil of pure discovery, as unspoiled as the search for the Grail. I found an institute to teach it to me.

In one of the classes the professore passed out copies of his study of Remote Sensing: “What You Can Learn From Sensors on Spacecraft That Look Inward at the Earth and Outward at the Planets, the Galaxies, and, Going Back in Time, the Cosmos.” Course emphasis was on the Landsat series of satellites that, starting in 1972, provide a continuous multispectral record of the Earth’s land and some oceans. This was fascinating but far removed from my vision of an aging, solicitous Franco bent over yellowed paper with a lens, pen and Facts book. I left cartography for architectural drafting, enrolling in OEDG 100 Cnstrctn Prncpls & Blprnt Reading 4.0cr and OEDG 160 Cnstrctn Take-Offs & Estimating OR 3.0cr. If not maps, I would make blueprints.

An aerial drawing of our city would be festooned with diagonals and curves and arches with circles, squares and twists at intervals along their sides. The “crownprint” of a stairway would be a vortex of diminishing lines below a figure beside a track. Life compacted so manageably in drafting.

It expanded again when I met Lazarro. And Lucca.

*

“Maybe what you need, Lucca, is a project,” I say to him, “to take your mind off whatever it is you are thinking about.”

We have tea, the afternoon alone, as usual.

“I only think about you, cara mia,” he says, smiling under his brows and leaning toward me with a kiss. Perhaps it is ‘something’ and not ‘someone’ after all, I think to myself. “You’re not going to quote poetry, are you?” I ask him playfully.

“Not at the moment,” he says as we tumble down like the venetian blinds at the window, the drawstring snapping out of my hand and dancing in the air.

Later he continues, “Anyway, I know what to do, and it’s something you can help me with.”

“What’s that?”

“I’ll tell you when I have the details worked out,” he says.

The sun reflects off his lenses as he turns toward the window again. But even Remote Sensing does not get the rest out of him.

*

Lazarro walks in the door with a big smile and announces he has been invited to the bocce ball finals in Sicilia, and he’s going, right away. He does a little dance in the doorway. We decide to celebrate with a non-Sunday trip to Gasperetti’s for antipasto and lasagna. “I’ll buy,” says Lazarro, flush from winning his bets on his game today.

As we come out at the top of the stairs and onto the footpath, he asks, “Will you two be alright while I am gone? You seem so distracted, Lucca.”

“I’m feeling better,” Lucca tells him, “don’t worry about us.” I am looking at Lazarro, wondering how to properly send him on his way in the short time before he goes. He looks at Lucca and then at me.

An elevation drawing of our city, the blueprint from the side view, would show an impenetrable forest of buildings and support structures.

“Will you be on television?” Lucca asks, then turns to me behind Lazarro and shrugs his shoulders, lifting his palms up like empty plates. We don’t even have a television. “Will you phone?” I throw in.

“Of course! What do you want from Italia?”

“Loafers!” Lucca says as our walking speeds up to a dash for the restaurant. “Something silk,” I whisper into his ear, taking his arm briefly and then letting go as Lucca holds the door and we swing into the restaurant. In each of us our happiness is greater than our uncertainties, but those go to the depths of our minds or heart, whichever is deeper.

*

“I’ve been thinking, Rosella,” Lucca says while we walk back from seeing Lazarro off. My heart starts pounding, but he continues, “When Montale won the Nobel Prize, do you know what he said? He was 79. He beat out Saul Bellow! He said that the award made his life, ‘which was always unhappy, less unhappy.’ I’ve been thinking too much, perhaps; maybe I need to find something I know something about and do something with it.” I feel relieved.

“So, I’ve been outlining the poetry of bocce ball.”

This last part makes no sense to me at all. I look at him, at the dark curl of hair that reaches around his right ear. I want to trace it with my lips and make a verse of it.

“The complexities and rhythms of the game,” he continues, “the layers of loss and triumph, dread and happiness, the flying, rolling, dropping movements toward the whole. The court. How poor Lazarro might actually lose the championship because he practices only on park greens. He is too much the puntatore. A bocce ball court should be hard so you can practice all the other release methods: Volo, raffa, the spock. He needs to master the loft, strong flying, strong smashing. It’s not lawn bowling, you know.”

“I know,” I tell him, “there is so much more….” as I move over on the couch toward him. He puts his arm around me, but he is intent on talking. I am listening to him, but at the same time thinking how our city will look to Lazarro from the sky when his plane flies over. How all the specks dotting the footbridges will disappear down the dark stair-holes like ants down a pipe, how the whole city will be hidden from him beneath laced bands.

“I have a plan,” he says decisively.

“What?”

“We’ll build a bocce ball court. A regulation one. In the lot next to the apartment.

“…. Come questa pietra/ è il mio pianto / che non si vede—like this stone is my weeping that can’t be seen/ Living discounts death….” he shouts, and makes a gesture putting fingers and thumb together and shaking as if sprinkling spice out of them onto a bowl of pasta fagioli.

*

When his plane banks over the city at take-off, Lazarro sees the footbridges and dark holes diving down from the sides. He doesn’t see anything moving, though, and the rest of the city is hidden under Byzantine, interlacing bands.

Several hours later, as the plane passes over the pole toward Europe, Lazarro wakes up. He looks out at the brilliant blue of the dawning planet reflected into his window. He thinks of his little family at home and at this moment he loves them like the perfect crystalline blue that starts the world every day.

*

The next afternoon Lucca turns away from the window and says to me. “I’ve been reading all week. I’ll tell you everything I know and you can draft up the plans. Regulation!

“We’ll get started right away.” Then he adds, smiling broadly, “Well, maybe in a few minutes.”

*

Regulation international competition courts are 13' by 92', usually cut down to 12' by 60' for non-tournament play. Backstops are 4 1/2" high, 12' wide and are placed 60' apart. A foul line is marked out 10' from each backstop. Traces of the game have been recorded as early as 5200 BC in early Egyptian wall paintings, when the early non-regulation courts would have been 1.5 cubits by 4 cubits. Along the tomb and palacewalls, men and women in stone profile, their eyes intense with outline, stand or sit in relief across from each other, waiting for centuries for the start of the right look in each other’s eyes. Around them, men in short cloths play bocce ball.

Awash in his mission, Lucca goes to the art supply store and buys me all new drafting materials: dusting brush; bow compass; curves; lead crayon; map measurer; electric eraser; black and colored ink; right angle; gauge; clip eraser and refill; permanent and non permanent markers; lead; ultrasonic cleaner; pantograph; digital Planimeter; technical pen; lead holder (for mechanical pencil); mechanical pencil; protractor; drafting tape; T-square and drafting paper. He puts them in a large wooden box and gives them to me with a little bow, saying, “I love you like the endless black night that bore me at the foot of staircases.”

Egyptians played with polished round stones. Later, olive wood was more common, polished to the delicate sheen of sun-kissed bosoms. Kings Carlos IV and V, citing national security, prohibited bocce for strategic reasons.

Emperor Augustus played bocce, his curls tight against his forehead, his skirt loose against his legs. Livia, who quietly endured his other enthusiasms, watched attentively as he prepared for the throw. The Empress held her royal breath tight within her until he released. The early Romans played it with coconuts brought back from Africa. The coarse hairs of the coconuts fell in the court; the fine hairs on the arms of the puntatori glittered their small mirrors of flexed light.

Docents from the University of Montpelier, France, discredited earlier claims that playing it had great therapeutic effects in curing rheumatism, yet its popularity soared. Rows of women watched the games, their fine costumes crackling and rustling in sequence as they bent in the direction of the throw.

The Republic of Venice publicly condemned it, the Catholic Church declared it a gambling device, thereby prohibiting clergymen from playing it. The City of Metropolitana, when we show my initial draft and plans to the regulator of permits, has no objection whatsoever and several officials ask to be invited to play when we are finished. I give Lucca a framed photographic print from the Leica Exhibition at the Louvre of two Frenchmen playing bocce in the foreground of a magnificent palace—one watching and one in the puntatore position. Behind them and to the left is a sculpture of the recumbent Venus raising a gracefully indicating hand that bends in the direction of the throw.

We plot the construction details slowly and thoroughly. Lucca alternately consults his sources and shouts a poem. My hands dry out from washing off ink. There are other things we can or should do, but we are preoccupied. “Sir Francis Drake,” Lucca reads in his quiet voice, “when his aides tried to hurry his throw due to a military advance, said, ‘First we finish the game, then we’ll deal with the Armada.’”

*

The elevation view of my plans shows treated 4x6s with chamfered tops and lag bolts holding up the sides and backboards. The sideboards are 2x12s. Concrete casings around the posts descend to the depth of the frost line, or 36", whichever is deeper.

We wait for a dry day to lay out the court. On the same day, in Sicilia, where the mountains meet the sea, in Agrigento, gold with orange and lemon orchards, Lazarro surprises the field with his gentle, winning shot and now stands garlanded in the piazza with his trophy and beaming team members. He stays a few more days, betting on the remaining games and buying loafers and silk with his winnings before returning to his family in his beloved city of elevations.

*

First we put down 3'5" of mason sand, leveling it with gloved hands around the 4" perforated drain tile, spreading everything outward. Lucca pauses, sits up on his heels and knees, hands on his thigh-tops in the middle of the court foundations, and shouts Ungaretti: “Ora potro' baciare solo in sogno… Now I dream I can kiss his trusting hands/ And I go on talking, I work,/ I've hardly changed, I'm afraid, I smoke. . ./ How can I bear the weight of so much night?” proud and happy in his realized sadness.

On top of that layer, we put crushed Mediterranean oyster shells. We pause for a glass of Montepulciano del’Abruzzo and a kiss. Next, a layer of fine brick dust. Finally, we smooth the top layer, first with a rake, then with a broom. A small crowd gathers. They see what this is going to be, and the possibilities excite them. One of them has a fur hat.

We stand to survey amid respectful applause. From this point on, we know, we will have to rely on nature—rainfall highlights the low spots—and on Lazarro, because the more the court is used, the better the playing surface will become. We acknowledge the crowd gracefully.

Pouring another glass of wine, Lucca turns to the gathering and shouts, “Little by little I've gathered into me, enclosed, / The mute leap of your hope. / For you I am the dawn, the day, untouched." Fortunately he quotes it in Italian and will not be accused of fostering new religions. “… Sono per te l'aurora e intatto giorno." The applause is as wild as this group can muster, considering they have no idea what he is saying. The foiled metal on the top of a bottle of vodka glitters its small mirrors of reflected light. Someone produces more wine.

There is a still much to do. The surface will crack and crack again. We must roll it and broom it over and over until it stabilizes itself. If it does not crack, Lucca has read, it is probably too sandy and will require constant maintenance.

We must also dust it occasionally and protect it from dancers and marble players.

Still other things remain to be done: Lazarro will play endless matches and become famous worldwide, though he can’t participate in the Olympics because of his gambling; Lucca will write numerous poems and outline them in a book, though he will only be invited to read aloud once; I will apply for and be given a job as a designer with the Parks Development and Maintenance Department. Inspired by my predecessors and the Italian avant-garde, we will paint the floor of our apartment green, the ceiling blue.

We can hardly wait to see Lazarro and hurry to the airport in time to see the plane taxi. We wonder what he’s bringing for us. While Lucca is getting the luggage, Lazarro gives me a sunny, golden kiss that tastes of citrus. Back at the apartment I give him the framed blueprint for the court and a promise about tomorrow evening. Lucca skips his class at the college. The three of us drink Bolla through the late afternoon, eat spaghetti and look out the window, proud and, for now, content.

From the overview, the 4x6s against the sideboards look like the tops of stairwells descending from wooden pathways.

The sun begins to set; the light is long and indirect. Measuring from outside to outside we are, at this moment, perfect and close. I love these men like the compacted earth, the reticulate air, this filigreed city of layers and steps.

§ § §

Kathryn Rantala’s credits include Field, The Iowa Review Web, New Orleans Review, Archipelago, Notre Dame Review, 3rd Bed, Oregon Review, elimae, failbetter, Crowd, Poems Niederngasse, Raven Chronicles, Connecticut River Review and many others. Her book, Missing Pieces, is available from the publisher, Ocean View Press, Denver.

She is editor of the eclectic journal, Snow Monkey, and of Ravenna Press, publisher in 2003-04 of Norman Lock, John Sweet, Soren Gauger, Bryan McCarvey and Harold Bowes. She can be reached by email at rantala@gte.net

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