We are going to Italy in March. Italy in March—it sings like April in Paris: Eros Ramazzotti will fill the air as we float to the Piazza di Spagna. And there, my lover will kiss me and when the time is right, he will say to me in his shaky Italian, È ora, amore mio, di far visita a mio padre (it’s time, my love, to visit my father), who is buried at the Basilica di Santa Maria in Montesanto, known as the Church of Artists. His father was a painter, a dreamy man, who had the look of a blended Monte and Whitman. I wanted to meet this man who made my lover. I wanted to see the similarities and differences. His mother said they had the same eyes, but he passed away before we could get there like the sickly child who died in the sky, just after treatment, dying before she could get better. And the figure skaters who died above the icy Potomac, fit for the gold, but dying before they could feel its weight around their necks. I curse this moment; the evil interval that snatches life like the frost that took the buds on my magnolia tree just as they were about to bloom.

Bio: Nancy Byrne Iannucci