Alessandra Bava is a poet and a translator living in the Eternal city. She is the author of four chapbooks: Guerrilla Blues, Nocturne, They Talk About Death and Diagnosis (dancing girl press, 2015). Her poems and translations have appeared or are upcoming in magazines such as Gargoyle, Plath Profiles, Tinderbox, Thrush and Waxwing. She has edited an Anthology of New American Poetry and she keeps working at the biography of a contemporary American poet.
You call me from the
bedroom. “Let’s read
Bukowski the way he
would have.”
We sit on the bed,
wearing our
underwear only and
sip Heineken beer
from the bottle. In
turn we read poems
full of drunkenness,
pain, death, sex,
solitude, roaches,
women, conversations.
The whole world rolls
out of our mouths
saddening us and
making us laugh.
So much depth,
so much life makes
me crave it all.
Mahler and the
Inferno, Dostoevsky,
poetry and more beer.
(for John)