All in by Maria Surricchio
by Maria Surricchio
—Eavan Boland
One hovers, head bent sharply down—
strains with waiting for the other
pushing up with such force
its whole body seems to rise
into its chest with the thrust, tailfeathers
tapering long and slender below. Swollen
and filling with blood, my son’s new tattoo
of two swallows he says
are his grandparents. Were they like this—
so muscular an ache as they reached
for each other? My son only knew my mother
in perpetual motion, her small, darting
body. Smiling from photos, my father
appears calm, still, but does my son see
what I did, even as a child: the restlessness
he checked for the life he didn’t want
in a gray country he didn’t love? And more—
how it took everything she had
to be always moving toward him.
And for him, to stay in place.
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Maria Surricchio is originally from the UK and now lives near Boulder, Colorado. A life-long lover of poetry, she began writing in 2020 after a long marketing career. A Pushcart Prize nominee, her work has been published in Blackbird, Salamander, Poet Lore, Chicago Quarterly Review, The Comstock Review, and elsewhere. She has a BA in Modern Languages from Cambridge University and holds an MFA from Pacific University.
by Maria Surricchio
of figs dripping in Adriatic heat,
in the mulberry-stained
strings of a mandolin,
rowdy goats, vines ablaze in autumn,
and the jewel-colored lining
of a dark wool coat. I love you
in day arriving all-at-once after
smooth night cracks open, and spring
that can’t make up its mind—
will it come, will it try today?
I love you in a painting I saw once
of wondrous anatomy—
how the heart filled the chest
and had to be cradled—
and the forty frescoes
of the Vatican Map Gallery,
all cities south of Rome
announcing their names
upside down. I love you
in the sound of geese
before I see them,
the same beach walk three times
in one day, in the octopus—
den festooned
like a holiday parade
as she begins to waste away.
And in your father,
clipped cinnamon saint,
who puts fish sauce in every recipe,
keeps seven hives
but doesn’t eat honey, releases trout
to a stream as though
it’s a bassinet of reeds.
Our boys, we miss the mark
constantly. Still, I love
how you’re every point
on a compass,
and we’re like the Pineapple Express—
I’m often hot, he’s mostly
heavy—but not
in our overwhelming arrival, in how
we circled and circled
before making landfall.
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Maria Surricchio is originally from the UK and now lives near Boulder, Colorado. A life-long lover of poetry, she began writing in 2020 after a long marketing career. Pushcart-nominated, her work has been published and is forthcoming in Pirene's Fountain, Poet Lore, Lily Poetry Review, The Comstock Review, I-70 Review, and elsewhere. She has a BA in Modern Languages from Cambridge University and is an MFA candidate at Pacific University.
